Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet it alone.

He had her in his arms, her face like a wet flower at his lips, and all their vain terrors shriveling up like ghosts at sunrise.

“Yes, the Gorgon has dried your tears,” he said. “Well, she opened my eyes too; it's a delusion to say that she blinds people. What she does is just the contrary — she fastens their eyelids open, so that they're never again in the blessed darkness.”

The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!

there are lots of ways of answering a letter - and writing doesn't happen to be mine.

Dialogue in fiction should be reserved for the culminating moments and regarded as the spray into which the great wave of narrative breaks in curving towards the watcher on the shore.