Nations are as equal as so many madmen or drunkards.

Ningauble shrugged. You're a hero. You should know.

What do you care? You always liked loneliness better than you liked people. No offence liking yourself's the beginning of all love.

The result is ... that there's no room left in the world for the weird – though plenty for crude, contemptuous, wisecracking, fun-poking imitations of it.

What was life worth, anyway, if you had to sit around remembering not to mention this, that, and the other thing because someone else might be upset?

There are vampires and vampires, and not all of them suck blood.

Then time seemed to stop, or rather to lose its directional urgency of movement; it became a place in the open where one stood rather than a low, narrow corridor down which one was hurried.