Let his name be cleared and everyone else adjust their thinking. He had put in time, now they must do the work. His business was simple. Find Cecilia and love her, marry her and live without shame.

She would simply wait on the bridge, calm and obstinate, until events, real events, not her own fantasies, roe to her challenge, and dispelled her insignificance.

He's never quite got the trick of conversation, tending to hear in dissenting views, however mild, a kind of affront, an invitation to mortal combat.

In Leon's account of his life, no-one was mean-spirited, no-one schemed or lied or betrayed; everyone was celebrated at least in some degree... Leon turned out to be a spineless, grinning idiot.

This is how the entire course of a life can be changed - by doing nothing.

This is the pain-pleasure of having newly adult children; they're innocent and ruthless in forgetting their sweet old dependence.

The cost of oblivius daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realigment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse. Her reverie, once rich in plausible details, had become a passing silliness before the hard mass of the actual. It was difficult to come back.