Back in the East you can't do much without the right papers, but with the right papers you can do anything The believe in papers. Papers are power.

I would join Sisyphus in Hades and gladly push my boulder up the slope if only, each time it rolled back down, I were given a line of Aeschylus.

It is better of course to know useless things than to know nothing.

I think that the present is worth attention, one shouldn't sacrifice it to future conceptions of, of this future or that future.

It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.

When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?

I don't really have a system or set of principles. It's kind of common sense mixed up with instinct.