"I kept staring at the moon. I'm not sure if its light was good or evil. I thought it might not be either. The moon just shines with the light of chaos. Mysteriously. Brightly. That must not be either good or evil. Just as the rules of this world are not all good."

"What is honour? In Athens it is one thing, in Sparta another; and among the Medes it is something else again. But go where you will, there is no land where the dead return across the river."

"She was the Goddess Who Must Not Be Named; those who sought her never found her, yet she was known to come to the aid of those in greatest need. And, then again, sometimes she didn't. She was like that."

"Natural science in England, as Darwin already knew to his cost, was still the purview of Christian scholars. But here was a question that Darwin found compelling: if God had created all the creatures of the world, what possible reason could there be for the variations found in the Galápagos?"

"I remembered some lines from the papers: our nuclear stations are absolutely safe, we could build one on Red Square, they're safer than samovars. They're like stars and we'll 'light' the whole earth with them."

"The way a woman carries herself and the way she dresses ought to promote the following types of words: modesty, discretion, wisdom, beauty, elegance and refinement, but not sensuality, luxury, extravagance."

"The violence of language consists in its effort to capture the ineffable and, hence, to destroy it, to seize hold of that which must remain elusive for language to operate as a living thing."