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“(...) The truth is that I am gloomy - gloomier than I ever felt during the war. Everything is so broken, Sophie: the roads, the buildings, the people. Especially the people.”

“There was something awesome in the thought of the solitary mortal standing by the open window and summoning in from the gloom outside the spirits of the nether world.”

“The old adage - humour is the best way to make the unbearable bearable - may be true.”

“The Folly had last been refurbished in the 1930s when the British establishment firmly believed that central heating was the work, if not of the devil per se, then definitely evil foreigners bent on weakening the hardy British spirit.”

“The good horror tale will dance it's way to the center of your life and find the secret door to the room you believed no one but you knew of.”

“Writing is the fruit of life. Life isn't the fruit of writing.”

“The height of your hair illustrates the emotional bandwidth in which you may operate, which is why Chris Walken can emphasise the syllable which he deems appropriate rather than the one that might convey meaning.”

“It is strange how we hold on to the pieces of the past while we wait for our futures.”

“I'm more concerned, (...), with the world as a riddle than with riddles in the world.”

“Our species has a strange fascination for the 'last' and the 'lost'. The thrill of an experience that future generations can enjoy is as nothing compared to the value of seeing something that subsequently was ruined. He who sees last, sees best. Just a grieving relatives will argue about who had the last word with the deceased.”

“Francis Crozier now understood that the most desirable and erotic thing a woman could wear were the many modest layers such as Sophia Cracroft wore to dinner in the governor's house, enough silken fabric to conceal the lines of her body, allowing a man to concentrate on the exciting loveliness of her wit.”

“The noir hero is a knight in blood caked armor. He's dirty and he does his best to deny the fact that he's a hero the whole time."”

“When my parents weren’t watching the news, they were either waiting to watch the news or recovering from watching the news. The news confirmed their feeling that things were terrible everywhere, and there was nothing anyone could do about it apart from keep abreast of developments. I’ve avoided the news ever since.”

“Someone who expresses a feeling along the lines of "I don't read fantasy or go to any of those movies, none of those is real". [...] They simply can't lift the weight of fantasy. The muscles of the imagination have grown too weak.”

“Reszta jest milczeniem. The rest is silence”

“Vyshinsky: Why did you write the poem? Rostov: It demanded to be written. I simply happened to be sitting at the particular desk on the particular morning when it chose to make its demands. ”

“God isn't Father Christmas. You can only ask for the things for the mind. (...) Like courage, patience, understanding.”

“It seems to me, Golan, that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.”

“„Piosenka The Most Beautiful Girl In the World była dla niego szczególnie ważna. Znam przynajmniej trzy kobiety, oprócz mnie, które wierzą, ze była pisana specjalnie dla nich.””

“The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of universe together into one garment for us.”

“Practically half the world was asleep, and the rest od it was running around like a chicken with its head cut off.”

“Never underestimate the big importance of small things”

“I was the paleontologist who'd developed a fear of bones. I was the zoologist who could barely admit he was an animal. I was the evolutionary biologist who found it hard to accept that his time on earth, too, was limited.”

“(...) I share almost ninety-nine per cent of my genes with a chimpanzee - and our longevity is virtually the same - but I don't think you have an inkling of how much more I comprehend, and yet I know I must tear myself away from it. For example, I have a good grasp of just how infinitely great outer space is and how it's divided into galaxies and clusters of galaxies, spirals and lone stars, and that there are healthy stars and febrile red giants, white dwarfs and neutron stars, planets ans asteroids. I know everything about the sun and moon, about the evolution of life on earth, about the Pharaohs and the Chinese dynasties, the countries of the world and their peoples as presently constituted, not to mention all the studying I've done on plants and animals, canals and lakes, rivers and mountain passes. Without even a pause for thought I can tell you the names of several hundred cities, I can tell you the names of nearly all the countries in the world, and I know the approximate populations of every one. I have a knowledge of the historical background of the different cultures, their religion and mythology, and to a certain extent also the history of their languages, in particular etymological relationships, especially within the Indo-European family of languages, but I can certainly reel off a goodly number of expressions from the Semitic language too, and the same from Chinese and Japanese, not to mention all the topographical and personal names I know. In addition, I'm acquainted with several hundred individuals personally, and just from my own small country I could, at the drop of a hat, supply you with several thousand names of loving fellow countrymen whom I know something about - fairly extensive biographical knowledge in some cases. And I needn't confine myself to Norwegians, we're living more and more in a global village, and soon the village square will cover the entire galaxy. On another level, there are all the people I'm genuinely fond of, although it isn't just people one gets attached to, but places as well: just think of the all the places I know like the back of my hand, and where I can tell if someone's gone chopped down a bush or moved a stone. Then there are books, especially all those that have taught me so much about the biosphere and outer space, but also literary works, and through them all the imaginary people whose lives I've come to know and who, at times, have meant a great deal to me. And then I couldn't live without music, and I'm very eclectic, everything from folk music and Renaissance music to Schonberg and Penderecki, but I have to admit, and this has a bearing on the very perspective we're trying to gain, I have to admit to having a particular penchant for romantic music, and this, don't forget, can also be found amongst the works of Bach and Gluck, not to mention Albinoni. But romantic music has existed in every age, and even Plato warned against it because he believed that melancholy could actually weaken the state, and it's patently clear when you get to Puccini and Mahler that music has become a direct expression of what I'm trying to get you to comprehend, that life is too short and that the way human beings are fashioned means they must take leave of far too much. If you've heard Mahler's Abschied from Das Lied von the Erde you'll know what I mean. Hopefully you'll have understood that it's the farewell itself I'm referring to, the actual leave- taking, and that this takes place in the self-same organ where everything I'm saying goodbye to is stored.”

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“However, recent times, unfortunate, there has been a growing degeneration of the judiciary power, which finds its expression in a specific interpretation of the basic principles of this power (…) The degenerate form of these principles takes the form of three supposed principles: exclusivity, omnipotence, and voluntarism, which seem to be followed by some judges and legal theorists:”

“The best men are the male heroes created in fiction - by women (...) The Scarlet Pimpernel, Heathcliff, Rhett Butler, Mr Darcy - all created by women, and that is because they couldn't find a man they really liked, which made them sit down and create one”

“People will buy anything at jumble sales,' I said. 'At the Evacuated Children Charity Fair a woman bought a tree branch that had fallen on the table. ”

“"Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words." A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”

““Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, once declared, “I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and I’m rooting for the machines.””

“The monomyth is a single great circle of tales marking out each stage in the hero's life: from birth to death; then on again, through resurrection and rebirth.”