There was after all no mystery in the end of love, no mystery but the mystery of love itself, which was large certainly but as real as grass, as natural and unaccountable as bloom and branch and their growth.

The further in you go, the bigger it gets.

Just as a lamp waved in darkness creates a figure of light in the air, which remains for as long as the lamp repeats its motion exactly, so the universe retains its shape by repetition: the universe is Time's body. And how will we perceive this body? And how operate on it?

Violet said nothing, though big pearly tears, like a child's, trembled at her lashes. She suddenly missed John very much. Into him she could pour all the inarticulate perceptions, all the knowings and unknowings she felt, which, though he couldn't understand them really, he would receive reverently, and out of him would come then the advice, the warnings, the clever decisions she could never have made.

Seeing a woman's child is like seeing a woman naked, in the way it changes how her face looks to you, how her face becomes less the whole story.

God, he thought, her eyes are so bright, flashing, deep, full of promise, all those things eyes are in books but never are in life, and she was his.

Well, do you do that consciously?" Daily Alice asked, only partly of Cloud. "Do what?" Cloud said. "Grow up? No. Well. In a sense. You see it's inevitable, or refuse to. You greet it or don't -- take it in trade, maybe, for all you're going to lose anyway. Or you can refuse, and have what you've got to lose snatched from you, and never take payment -- never see a trade is possible.