If the Barbarians are destroyed, who will we then be able to blame for the bad things?

The notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick.

...in their millenial and long-lived patience they knew quite well how, in a hundred years, or a thousand years' time, or else, perhaps, tomorrow, in an hour's time, for it was all a gamble, a million to one chance, but all the same there was a chance that if they kept on shaking their chains, one day, some day, the clasps upon the shackles would part.

Strangers used to gather together at the cinema and sit together in the dark, like Ancient Greeks participating in the mysteries, dreaming the same dream in unison.

Moonlight, white satin, roses. A bride.

They were connoisseurs of boredom. They savoured the various bouquets of the subtly differentiated boredoms which rose from the long, wasted hours at the dead end of night.

The invisible is only another unexplored country, a brave new world.