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'Her body was a half-drawn knife.'

'"I will send you away with my blessing, Tané, if you promise me one thing," he murmured. "That one day, you will forgive yourself. You are in the spring of your life, child, and have much to learn about this world. Do not deny yourself the privilege of living."'

'"You saw me as the night does. As my truest self."'

'But so much knowledge had been lost over the centuries, so many records destroyed...'

'"My will was not always what it is now. Once I was as molten glass, yet to be spun into shape. I sense I have taken a shape she mislikes."'

'"Are you afraid?" "Of course." "Good. Fear will make you fight."'

'Her heart was a fistful of thunder.'

This is already so not my cup of tea. I just want to find out why it's so popular. We'll see how long I last.

'"Really now," I interrupted him, "have you finished with the trivial details? Get down to the story!" "Just a moment!" he replied in a bantering tone. "We're not in Europe where they sell meat without the bones!"'

'At the basis of his writing is a realization that much of human action is enigmatic and possibly inexplicable, and that an attempt to discover the motivations of people's actions can often lead to harrowing psychological consequences for the person carrying out the investigation.'

'The extent to which Vizyenos' stories are autobiographical is beside the point, but, as he became acquainted with novels and stories in English, French and German, he no doubt came to realize that the experiences his family had undergone were the stuff of fiction.'

'The familiar person faced by an un-familiar challenge—who can know or predict his behaviour?'

'A forbidding sort of man; a man who could not be trifled with; and yet, perhaps, a man who longed to be trifled with, just now and then?'

'But, as it turned out, Isabel suffered no worse fate than is common to most liars; namely, the loss of her audience through the sheer dullness of her fabrications.'

'"So perhaps none of it is a coincidence, really," she concluded, with the tentative optimism of the non-mathematical pupil who nevertheless knows when a sum looks right.'

'That wildness, that untamed fierceness...They weren't born of a free heart, but of one that had known despair so complete that living brightly, living violently, was the only way to outrun it.'

'In 1975 Stout observed with his characteristic wit to a gathering of colleagues: "[W]e...are a strange company, an odd assortment, difficult to define. Scientists who wear the standard brands must look upon us as mavericks, mongrels. Art historians obviously regard us as heavy-handed meddlers."'

'Upon the heaped skulls of all these ideals, one dispassionate, duller, greyer man survived triumphant, as Octavius survived the civil wars in Rome. Caesar and Pompey, Brutus and Antony, Cato and Cicero – all, with their genius, lacked the minor talent of being able to survive. Francisco Franco was the Octavius of Spain.'

'A group of "old shirts" visited Rome and offered Don Juan, son of King Alfonso, the "constitutional throne of a Falangist State". The prince refused.'

'A sister can never really show you a new expression on her face.'

'Let the creatures have their gaps, then.'

'"I thought you were dead." "Yes, I was dead, Grandmother," said the girl. The Grandmother: "Isn't it funny how everyone manages to die except me?"'

'Her life was one unremitting impassioned torment, so that one could not help wanting to be good to her; and then to push her away; and then to return to her again because one had not understood her – or oneself either, perhaps.'

'Sympathy has perhaps no alphabet, but it is to be hoped that one day it will be triumphant throughout the whole world.'

'The most remarkable thing about man's dreams is that they all come true; this has always been the case, though no one would care to admit it.'

'Not only had he seen cities and zoological gardens, he had also wandered in the woods where one finds happiness, or at least peace, and he knew the words that fit the locked compartments of the soul, like keys, and open them.'

'And to be able to look forward to the morrow in joyful expectation is good fortune indeed.'

'two human beings have such difficulty in understanding each other, there is nothing so tragical as two human beings.'

'The bookseller was busy boiling some fresh fish on an oil-stove; the steam from the pan filled the room, and the many shelves sagging beneath the weight of literature were lost like belts of crags in the fog.'

'Nothing in life is so beautiful as the night before what is yet to be, the night and its dew.'