"The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices—after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people's."
"For all the compasses in the world, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure."
"Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking: Well, at least I'm not dead."
"He's never known anything like it! But then, he has never known anything to write home about, so this is nothing to write home about."
"Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else."
"There must have been a moment, at the beginning, were we could have said -- no. But somehow we missed it."
"Death followed by eternity the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought."
"The bad end unhappily; the good, unluckily. That is what tragedy means."
"A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security."
"Death is the ultimate negative."
"Uncertainty is the normal state."
"You can't treat royalty like people with normal perverted desires."
"GUIL (quietly): Where we went wrong was getting on a boat. We can move, of course, change direction, rattle about, but our movement is contained within a larger one that carries us along as inexorably as the wind and current…"
"Free to move, speak, extemporize, and yet. We have not been cut loose. Our truancy is defined by one fixed star, and our drift represents merely a slight change of angle to it: we may seize the moment, toss it around while the moments pass, a short dash here, an exploration there, but we are brought round full circle to face again the single immutable fact --"