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'Just to be in love seemed the most blissful luxury I had ever known. The thought came to me that perhaps it is the loving that counts, not the being loved in return—that perhaps true loving can never know anything but happiness.'

😭😭😭

A defeated, airless, ugly feeling rose in her whenever she heard a person of her parents' generation talking brightly about home ownership, or foreign holidays... She felt this way sometimes simply if someone spoke about the future -- even the very near future -- in optimistic terms.

Shelley had long grown accustomed to the expectation that she was fated to be always on the losing side. New Zealand had been governed by the centre right since before she had been eligible to vote, and she could find little to excite her in any of the parties supposedly in opposition.

'If recovering is completely rebecoming something ing you once were, Mary didn't recover, just like nobody ever does from anything.'

'The greensand rock of the Cap was now thoroughly burnished by the sun. In these moments its similarity in colour to the churches of the region was unignorable. And who was to say it WASN'T a church, just because human hands had not built it? After all, it did what churches were supposed to do: it reached for the sky and filled those in its vicinity with awe and fear and perhaps a curious kind of reassurance.'

'How was it possible to be afraid in love, Therese thought. The two things did not go together. How was it possible to be afraid, when the two of them grew stronger every day? And every night. Every night and every morning. Together they possessed a miracle.'

'Was life, were human relations like this always, Therese wondered. Never solid ground underfoot. Always like gravel, a little yielding, noisy so the whole world could hear, so one always listened, too, for the loud, harsh step of the intruder's foot.'

'If any persons suppose that this Reform will lead to ulterior measures they are mistaken: for there is no one more decided against annual parliaments, universal suffrage and the ballot than I am. My object is not to favour, but to put an end to such hopes and projects.' - Lord Grey on his 'Great Reform Act' of 1832.

Good grief.

'Sometimes, Tom, we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions, not answers.'

'...since no one can ever give the exact measure of his needs, his thoughts or his sorrow, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we strum out tunes to make a bear dance, when we would move the stars to pity.'

'She would have been glad of someone in whom to confide all this; but how to describe an intangible unease, that shifts like the clouds and eddies like the wind? Lacking the words, she had neither the opportunity nor the courage.'

'The chief of the township broke all the rules of moderation. Inside his tomb, there was a long list of modern luxuries... a room set aside for a nightclub with karaoke equipment. He even built a nice carved stone chair, specifically reserved for his meeting with the president of a multinational corporation in the world of the dead.'

Looking back upon the long crisis of his own life (for so he perceived it, as if his selfhood was balanced, always, upon the point of choice—but what choice, he did not know, for this ambivalence was without a real beginning, and without a perceptible end) he felt only disassociated: from his own work, from his father's wishes, from the circumstances under which his country, and his family, had been shamed.

'Gold was not a treasure—this Tauwhare knew. Gold was like all capital in that it had no memory: its drift was always onward, away from the past.'

'He ordered a large scotch for himself, because he wanted to give the impression of being kind of a lush, and also because he wanted a large scotch.'

'What do I really want?' he thinks. This is, of course, an extremely good question. It was just such a pity that, life being as it tended to be, it so rarely came as part of a matched pair, with an extremely good answer.

'Tragedy puts something above humanity; so does Comedy; Romance puts humanity first.'

"'I suppose it's part of the human condition silly-clever people are always grizzling about,' said Liesl. 'If you want truth, I suppose you must shoot the film from God's point of view and with God's point of focus, whatever it may bem and I bet the result won't look much like cinema verité.'"

'Man is a noble animal, Davey. Not a good animal; a noble animal.'

'For I was, as you have already guessed, a collaborator with Destiny, not one who put a pistol to its head and demanded particular treasures.'

'I have been a boy myself, and I know what a boy is, which is to say, either a fool or an imprisoned man striving to get out.'

'The real Europe is not a posh cafe on the rue de Rivoli with gilded frescoes and little pots of famous hot chcolate... The real Europe is a border less network of supply and transport. It is shrink wrapped palettes of superpasteurised milk or powdered Nesquik or semiconductors. It is windowless warehouses where unseen men load goods that they will move through a giant grid called 'Europe'..."

'He could not be positive that reason was much help in the conduct of life. It seemed to him that life lived itself.'

'It was astonishing how difficult he found it to make romantic conversation. He found that silence helped him much more than words. He could look inexpressible things.'

Did not expect this book to be so funny

On the Nuer people: 'While in everyday affairs women operated with much the same independence as men, the marriage system did efface women's freedom to a degree... However, most Nuer women were not properly married. In fact, a large proportion were officially married to ghosts or to other women (who could be declared male for genealogical purposes).'

'Her whole body is contained by the lingerie, an absurd trapping on her, who could need nothing else to make her more desirable save breath itself; just a moving force behind those bones, that flesh, and the mind that wears and inhabits all she is.'

'Rummaging in your heart for JOY -- may as well go looking through the bins for it. Where's God, she had said to Al, where's God in all this? And Al had said, Morris says he's never seen God, He doesn't get out much. But he says he's seen the devil, he says he's on first-name terms with him, he claims he beat him at darts once.'

US history be like: 'The Southern Federalists, called Bunions, supported slavery and protectionism; the Northern Federalists or 'Old Honkies' supported free trade and emancipation. In 1844 the Old Honkies and some anti-slavery Republican Democrats formed the Democratic Republican party, also known as the Buggerlugs after their leader, Melvin Q. Buggerlug. However Buggerlug's Vice President was pro-slavery.'

Only John le Carré could write an international spy thriller with lots of action and violence, but also have a significant part of the climax take place at a board meeting of civil servants, and STILL make it exciting

'I will not be an angel,' I asserted, 'and will not be one till I die. I am myself.'