Some quotations," said Zellaby, "are greatly improved by lack of context.

If you run away from a thing just because you don't like it, you don't like what you find either.

Why was I condemned to live in a democracy where every fool's vote is equal to a sensible man's?

There was often a great deal of grown-up fuss that seemed disproportionate to causes.

And again there are no words. Words exist that can, used by a poet, achieve a dim monochrome of the body's love, but beyond that they fail clumsily. My love flowed out to her, hers back to me. Mine stroked and soothed. Hers caressed. The distance - and the difference - between us dwindled and vanished. We could meet, mingle, and blend. Neither one of us existed any more; for a time there was a single being that was both. There was escape from the solitary cell; a brief symbiosis, sharing all the word.

So you're in love with her?' she went on. A word again ... When the minds have learnt to mingle, when no thought is wholly one's own, and each has taken too much of the other ever to be entirely himself alone; when one has reached the beginning of seeing with a single eye, loving with a single heart, enjoying with a single joy; when there can be moments of identity and nothing is separate save bodies that long for one another ... When there is that, where is the word? There is only the inadequacy of the word that exists. 'We love one another,' I said.

It's humiliating to be dependent, anyway, but it's still a poorer pass to have no one to depend on.