Don't ever call me mad, Mycroft. I'm not mad. I'm just ... well, differently moraled, that's all.

In any regime there is always something that one should agree with, and in Shades there are quite a few notions that, on the face of it, seem like a good thing - the strict adherence to good manners, the fact that learning a musical instrument is compulsory, as is dancing, performing musicals and an hour's Useful Work every day in order to properly discharge your duty to society. But a cage is still a cage, irrespective of the nature of its bars.

Do I have to talk to insane people?" "You're a librarian now. I'm afraid it's mandatory.

Lesson one in time travel, Thursday. First of all, we are all time travellers. The vast majority of us manage only one day per day.

Reading, I had learned, was as creative a process as writing, sometimes more so. When we read of the dying rays of the setting sun or the boom and swish of the incoming tide, we should reserve as much praise for ourselves as for the author. After all, the reader is doing all the work - the writer might have died long ago.

I've managed to bring the backlog down to a mere sixty-eight years," she announced with some small sense of achievement. "I hope to be able to start marking the papers of pupils who are still alive by the end of the decade.

You have many fine qualities that I admire. But you are out of time. You should have been born a century ago, when values such as yours meant something.