"For truth be told, I was tormented by perceptions and their corollary temptation which from a social definition rendered me unsane, though from a more absolute viewpoint what I might be said to have been suffering from was an excess of insight."

"Here, in the company of the mindless trees, the free-flying birds, the bugs and frogs that passed from stimulus directly to response without the interval of consciousness between, did I hope to lose myself in the living mandala of evolution’s less self-tortured forms."

"Does something truly speak to me from beyond the void, or is it merely my own desire?"

"“In fifteen billion years did spirit out of less than dust evolve,” he said. “In fifteen billion more will not this universe of stars to less than dust return? Whence did it come? What is there when it is gone?”"

"Flaming torches arching from hand to hand, the silken rolling of flesh on flesh, tautened wire vibrating to the human word, ideogrammatic gestures of fear, love, and rage, the mathematical grace of bodies moving through space—all seemed revealed as shadows on the void, the pauvre panoply of man’s attempt to transcend the universe of space and time through the transmaterial purity of abstract form. Yet beyond this noble dance of human art, the highest expression of our spirit’s striving to transcend the realm of time and form, lay that which could not be encompassed by the artifice of man. From nothing are we born, to nothing do we go; the universe we know is but the void looped back upon itself, and form is but illusion’s final veil. We touch that which lies beyond only in those fleeting rare moments when the reality of form dissolves—through molecule and charge, the perfection of the meditative trance, orgasmic ego-loss, transcendent peaks of art, mayhap the instant of our death. Vraiment, is not the history of man from pigments smeared on the walls of caves to our present starflung age, our sciences and arts, our religions and our philosophies, our cultures and our noble dreams, our heroics and our darkest deeds, but the dance of spirit round this central void, the striving to transcend, and the deadly fear of same?"

"“Genius such as yours is a genetic gift.” “So I have heard from my parents.”"

"Even now, I cannot decide whether I was foolish dupe or noble and tragic lover. Or whether the two are one and the same."

"The appreciation of the connoisseur is the highest pleasure of the artiste."

"“If the path exists for spirit to transcend this sorry scheme of things entire, vraiment, it must exist for all.” Or for none at all, I thought, but deigned not to voice."

"True civilization consists precisely of conventions, rituals, and modes of oblique communication whereby the chaos within and the void without may be expressed and contained within the harmonious consensus of shared social objectivity, thus maintaining our bubble of crafted reality, the necessary illusion."

"The carrot is mightier than the stick."

"To become aware of a controlling process is to transcend the determinism of that process."

"The saddest day of your life isn't when you decide to sell out. The saddest day of your life is when you decide to sell out and nobody wants to buy."

"Thus human culture has been as much a product of the process of natural selection as the human species. We are not merely clockwork oranges, the clockwork itself, the social programming which determines our “repertoires of behavior,” how we respond to the world around us, is itself the product of a blind deterministic process."

"Any attempt at willful ignorance would now be futile or worse; the only talisman against excessive knowledge that might have puissance would be more knowledge."

"Beneath all this gaiety and baroque complexity lay the simple and so carefully denied: beyond the thin metal surrounding us was the endless humorless void. Hollow rings the laughter of orphans in the night."

"I could not deny that my spirit was amorally attracted to this ultimate temptation as my conscience was morally repelled by it."

"Redemption's just a word and as I'm not a Christian it means nothing to me."

"The one advantage of being childless is that one can choose one's children and so avoid the bizarre game of chance in which one passes one's best — or one's worst — genes to one's poor innocent offspring."

"Kester wrote about people and since human nature doesn't change his observations hadn't dated."

"But magic can't operate without a magician, and being a magician can beat a man to his knees."

"Christ, all you psychiatrists think about is sex — sex, sex, sex, sex, sex ..."

"Life's for living, not for mourning ... Live in the present, not the past."

"More tears. Disgraceful. I was getting just like Kester, weeping at the drop of a hat, but of course I was Kester. I'd become him, and now there was just this other stranger who wrote me debonair notes and who sounded just like me."

"'He wasn't just being selfish, he was being realistic. Marriage would have been very difficult if not downright impossible.'"

"Sexual desire has to be dead as a doornail before a man and a woman can be genuinely at peace in a platonic relationship."

"'... we have to be kind, we have to be charitable and we can't condemn people just because they get in a mess...even the best people can get into ghastly messes,...we must never judge other people too harshly because although they can make awful mistakes they can still be very nice people.'"

"Distrust grows out of lies. Wrong-doing grows out of distrust. Tragedy grows out of wrong-doing. But out of honesty grows love and love's so powerful, it'll be like a suit of armour, protecting Robert, protecting you."

"True doppelgängers should never meet face-to-face, you know."

"Ghosts, unshriven souls, psychological hang-ups — they all exist in the mind to put people through hell — they're just different ways [...] of looking at a given situation."

"What a bloody jungle income tax is! It's a wonder we don't all go on strike and refuse to pay."

"'Barbarity's everywhere, that's the truth of it. Absolutely anyone is capable of absolutely anything.' 'My dear Papa, I had no idea you were such a cynic!' 'That's not cynicism, that's honesty — as you well know, dealing with criminals as you do, seeing the human race continually at its worst.'"

"'Little girls don't stay playmates. Little girls become big girls and big girls become sweethearts.'"

"'I deserve to be thought a coward. I am a coward. I'm just so bloody afraid of dying — of losing —'"

"Death had won my three friends; Death had almost won me. But now I was the one who was going to win and I was going to win by outwitting Death over and over again ... To compete with Death, as I had discovered in the mountains, was to know one was alive."

"'There are standards of immorality as well as standards of morality, Robert. Make sure yours are high.'"

"'The English don't have opinions about the Irish. They have prejudices.'"

"Every woman needs a special friend of her own sex with whom she can 'have a haircombing' about everything from menstruation to male monsters, and Julie had become that kind of special friend."

"'I could always walk out on a husband. But I could never turn my back on a friend.'"

"'Bloody men! sometimes I feel I hate them all.'"

"Romance is the opiate of the dissatisfied, it anaesthesises them from the pain of their disordered second-rate lives [...] If romance is the opiate of the dissatisfied then surely nostalgia is the opiate of the disillusioned, for those who see all their dreams come true and find themselves living in a nightmare."

"'But never mind, all the best heroines are beautiful orphans, abandoned to their fate, and the one thing that's certain about my situation is that I'm going to be a heroine when I grow up.' 'Can I be a hero?' 'Well, I suppose you can try. But you'll have to try very hard.'"

"'Friendship's best,' I said, 'and friendship's forever because no baby can come along to spoil it.'"

"One must be rational about such matters and being rational need not mean being cold."

"'To be distracted is pardonable. To be incoherent is simply unobliging.'"

"Recovering from an ill-starred romance is, after all, to anyone of sufficient will-power and self-respect, purely an attitude of mind."

"A rational disposition must necessarily preclude a romantic outlook in life, and only the failures of this world can afford to dispense with a rational disposition."

"Boredom on social occasions is an inescapable hazard for the over-educated, and for the over-ambitious it must be endured."