Language is an archaeological vehicle... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.

The sign said 'The Green Turtle, Chelonia myadas, is the source of turtle soup....' I am the source of William G. soup if it comes to that. Everyone is the source of his or her kind of soup. In a town as big as London, that's a lot of soup walking around.

Explorers have to be ready to die lost.

When you suffer an attack of nerves you're being attacked by the nervous system. What chance has a man got against a system?.

Who is Alice?" asked mother. "Alice is somebody that nobody can see," said Frances. "And that is why she does not have a birthday. So I am singing Happy Thursday to her." - Frances the badger

Sometimes I think that the biggest difference between men and women is that more men need to seek out some terrible lurking thing in existence and hurl themselves upon it. Women know where it lives but they can let it alone.

Time's arrow, we are told, is a one-way thing. . . Memory's arrow, like the needle of a compass too close to a lodestone, spins in all directions.