"Waiting for a 136 bus from Highgate station to Muswell Hill Broadway on a misty evening in February is a bit like lurking outside the gates of purgatory."

"I was honestly very nervous of Constance Wheatcroft. And I wasn't the only one. Her entire family was afraid of her. Dogs were afraid of her. Bindweed in the hedge would wither as she passed; birds would forget their nesting instincts and fly back to north Africa at the sound of her hideous cries."

"When the doctor was there, Alfred refused to believe that he'd had a stroke. "I can't have had a stroke," he grated, in a terrible rage, "I've got 93,000 pounds in my current account.""

"One of the astounding qualities of that family was their capacity to fill innocent bystanders with thoughts of murder."

"All my life I have entirely missed the point; and the turning, as I also have no sense of direction. This long period of uncertainty in the twilight land of the fuddled (it is now more than sixty years) has taken its toll."

"All my life I have felt myself to be on the edge of things. All my life I have suffered from bad dreams. All my life I have had difficulty in knowing whether I am awake or in a nightmare."

"The poor don't really like that ticket. They are desperate to get away and join the rich, and have glossy hair, bright eyes and white teeth. The rich live longer and can afford to be charming."

"Poverty can curdle the libido and corrode civilized thoughts. One's sense of humour vanishes, to be replaced by a curry-spoiling sarcasm as one's Mr Hyde emerges from the swamp of the subconscious."

"Being poor is a little like having an earache over a Bank Holiday. All you can think about is the pain and how long it will be before a healing hand can be found to take away the anguish."

"She smiled at me, arsenically."

"Once a man next to me found the handle of a radiator in his mashed potato; he said nothing, merely moving it to the side of his plate after sucking the mashed potato off it first. Nobody else said anything either. If the truth was known several of us were probably jealous."

""Stay calm, sir," I cried. "Don't excite yourself, it could mean death." He took me at my word and instantly fell inert. I didn't know whether he was obeying me or had died."

"I didn't care as an ex-ballet dancer wrote and told me she had seen the production and fallen in love with my legs. She said that in other circumstances she could have lived happily with my legs but that she only had a small flat in Holland Park."

"It was in the church that I got to love shadows and dark corners, musty cupboards and creaking floorboards. I was a perfect recruit for the Addams family. Cobwebs made me whimper with joy."

"Who was it that designed brown envelopes? I feel sure that he hated people whoever he was. I wonder where he's buried?"

"The theatre couldn't match what was going on in a court of law or at football grounds. The theatre has never been able to match what goes on anywhere, that's why so few people go."

"Of course, for a lot of people, death was a welcome change. Grinding poverty takes the edge off most things, including life."

"Tom Fleming, the eldest, was said to look like King George V, and indeed, was often mistaken for His Majesty when in the vicinity of Scotland Road, Anfield Road or Lime Street. Why people would suspect that the King might be working in Tate and Lyle's sugar factory is beyond me, but there you are."

"One tortured soul I know who suffers from amazingly premature ejaculation — I mean so premature that he hasn't got any children after eleven years of marriage — was told by the priest that it was probably a blessing in disguise. What a piece of advice to give to a poor sod who comes off at the sound of his wife's car in the drive."

"The notion that God was everywhere put paid to any possible peace of mind by the time I was six."

"The chaos of our lives suited me; I don't think I wanted it to end."

"He dug into the ground until he came up with a stone the size of his thumbnail. “—if the universe was the size of this rock, then each star would be the size of a quark.”"

"She laughed. “Guilt: the Catholic Church’s first patent.”"

"Life seems to be emergent from the very fabric of the universe that contains us, hardwired into physical law. And so, I suppose, mind is emergent too."

"The shortness of human lives, she thought. Our curse. Every generation thinks it is immortal, that it has been born into a world that has never changed, and will never change."

"After a time it became unbearable, the lesson blinding in its cruelty: but if the universe didn’t get you, other sentient beings would."

"She wondered if the gerontocrats—conservative, selfish, reclusive, obsessive—were responsible for a more general malaise that seemed to her to have afflicted this fast-forwarded world. There had been change—new fashions, gadgetry, terminology—but, it seemed to her, no progress. In science and art she could see no signs of meaningful innovation. The world’s nations evolved, but the various supranational structures had not changed for decades: the political institutions that wielded the power had ossified."

"Madeleine’s heart sank. Nemoto would be hard to deal with rationally. People with missions always were."

"The law is a weapon of government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that."

"As an engineer, he knew that a bucket-load of philosophical principles wasn’t worth a grain of good hard fact."

"Maura pulled an elaborate face. “Don’t these people realize the cat is already out of the bag? You can’t control the public’s access to information anymore—and you certainly can’t control their response. Nor should you try, in my opinion.”"

"Well, the world may be heading for the iceberg, but the dead hand of old Darwin is still on the tiller. What am I talking about? Just this: if most people stop breeding, the handful of people who love kids and want to have them—people like me—are, within a generation or two, going to outnumber everyone else. Simple math. And that’s exactly what is happening."

"There was a great wave of extinctions that, ultimately, couldn’t be stopped. How bad was it? Well, Oona, we don’t really know. We didn’t even get as far as counting all the species before destroying them. Yes, that’s right; a lot of species must have died out before we even knew they were there. Shivery thought, isn’t it?"

"The immediate future, regardless of Carter, was as dangerous as it had ever been. And the temptation many people seemed to feel to sacrifice their freedom to stern utopians who promised to order that future for them was growing stronger."

"Almost all of history was a carefully constructed mythology for use as propaganda or nation building."

"“Have you studied history, Anna?” “Yes. The information is limited, the interpretation is partial. But it is interesting.”"

"It is of course a truism that all logically possible universes must exist."

"Everyone was used to official manipulation of the truth—to zhilu weima, to point at a deer and call it a horse, as the expression went."

"It was a war that was inevitable because it was a war that everybody wanted."

"To some extent the human race today seems to react as a single organism to great events. After all, we live in a wired world. Memes—information, ideas, fears, and hopes—spread around the media and online information channels literally at light speed. It may be that this mass reaction is the greatest single danger facing us."

"I did not enter politics to be involved in this kind of operation. But who did? And I have learned that leadership is, more often than not, the art of choosing the least worst among evils."

"It seems to me that the human race simply isn’t advanced enough yet to be able to trust any subset of itself with the power to run the lives of the rest."

"The future, it seemed, was turning out to be one damn thing after another."

"Anyhow, she knew when she looked into her heart she’d never really wanted kids anyhow. She’d seen how kids dropped from the sky and exploded people’s lives like squalling neutron bombs. She was honest enough to admit she was too selfish for that; her life, her only life, was her own."

"Since 1970 or thereabouts going to space has not been part of our national agenda. NASA has kept complete control over space. But since 1970 NASA has produced paper, not spaceships."

"It seems to me that age, growing old, is a war between wisdom and bitterness. I’m not sure how I’ll come out of that war myself, assuming I get so far. Maybe some things are more important than life itself. But what?"

"All the tabloid-fed hysteria, the religious ravings, the pompous and hostile commentaries, made no sense, of course. If to abandon ten or a thousand sentient squid was a crime, so was abandoning one. But when, she thought sourly, had sense and rationality been a predominant element in public debate on science and technology?"

"“The only advantage of e-therapists,” Maura murmured, “is that their horseshit is cheaper than humans’.”"

"In engineering, experience gained is directly proportional to the amount of equipment ruined."

"From the air Illinois was a vast emptiness studded by lost-looking little towns."