If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.

Fate seemed to be playing a series of extraordinarily unamusing jokes.

The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually IN the past. It was like that at this moment.

But the thing that I saw in your face no power can disinherit: No bomb that ever burst shatters the crystal spirit.

Happiness can only exist in acceptance.

Mrs Weaver nosed among the books, too dim-witted to grasp that they were in alphabetical order.

The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes.