It didn't hurt, did it? When I hit you?" "Sure. Fractured skull. Concussion, the lot..." "But seriously, Kath. No hard feelings, right? I'm awfully sorry. I honestly am.

For their kind do not know what it is to risk everything in the endeavor to rise above the mediocre.

In fact, the harder he tried, the more laughable his efforts turned out.

How can old wounds heal while maggots linger so richly?

Why should one not enjoy in a light-hearted sort of way stories of ladies and gentlemen who fall in love and express their feelings for each other, often in most elegant phrases?

Because somewhere underneath, a part of us stayed like that: fearful of the world around us, and - no matter how much we despised ourselves for it - unable quite to let each other go.

Silence is just as likely to indicate the most profound ideas forming, the deepest energies being summoned.

Are you still there, Axl?” “Still here, princess.

The giant, once well buried, now stirs. When soon he rises, as surely he will, the friendly bonds between us will prove as knots young girls make with the stems of small flowers.

You'll figure it out! You get on your plane and I'll get on mine. And we'll see which one crashes!

Plenty of couples, they start off loving each other, then get tired of each other, end up hating each other. Sometimes though it goes the other way.

It might be just some trend that came and went," I said. "But for us, it’s our life.

I don't know why, but it didn't seem an option for more than one of us to storm off, and I wanted to make sure that one was me.

A couple may claim to be bonded by love, but we boatmen may see instead resentment, anger, even hatred. Or a great barrenness. Sometimes a fear of loneliness and nothing more.

The rest of my life stretches out as an emptiness before me.

We're the only ones who care now. The likes of you and me, Ono, when we look back over our lives and see they were flawed, we're the only ones who care now.

Democracy is a fine thing. But that doesn't mean citizens have a right to run riot whenever they disagree with something. #Page: 120

If disappointments do come, you will carry on still. You will say, just as he does, I am so lucky.

Dinner will be served at the usual time and I am pleased to say there will be no discernible traces left of the recent occurrence by that time.

The giant, once well buried, now stirs. When soon he rises,

Then he took the sword in both hands and raised it—and Gawain’s posture took on an unmistakable grandeur.

But Ruth and Tommy never did anything gross in front of people, and if sometimes they cuddled or whatever, it felt like they were genuinely doing it for each other, not for an audience.

After all, what can we gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?

It would have been so stupid, Niki went on, If you would just accepted everything the way it was and just stayed where you were. At least you made an effort.

Now naturally, like many of us, I have a reluctance to change too much of the old ways.

How so much honourable is such a contest, in which one's moral conduct and achievement are brought as witnesses rather than the size of one's purse. #Page: 10

I'm wondering if without our memories, there's nothing for it but for our love to fade and die.

Today’s world is too foul a place for fine and noble instincts.

How often have you know it for the butler who is on everyone's lips one day as the greatest of his generation to be proved demonstrably within a few years to have been nothing of the sort?

I think genre rules should be porous, if not nonexistent.

After all, there’s no turning back the clock now. One can’t be forever dwelling on what might have been. One should realize one has as good as most, perhaps better, and be grateful.

But you will no doubt agree that the very best staff plans are those which give clear margins of error to allow for those days when an employee is ill or for one reason or another below par.

You could sense just from the huge sky, that you were walking towards the sea.

Abiding love that has endured the years—that we see only rarely. When we do, we’re only too glad to ferry the couple together.

And it started to dawn on me, I suppose, that a lot of things I’d always assumed I’d plenty of time to get round to doing, I might now have to act on pretty soon or else let them go forever.

It would be the saddest thing to me, princess. To walk separately from you, when the ground will let us go as we always did.

…in bantering lies the key to human warmth.

Like you were sad, maybe. And a bit scared.

Dignity’ has to do crucially with a butler’s ability not to abandon the professional being he inhabits.

This country awakens so many memories, though each seems like some restless sparrow I know will flee any moment into the breeze.

You've got to enjoy yourself. The evening's the best part of the day. You've done your day's work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it.

If we'd understood that back then-who knows?-maybe we'd have kept a tighter hold of one another.

When we were eleven, say, we really weren't interested in each other's poems at all. . . . But we didn't know a thing about poetry. We didn't care about it.

When the hour’s too late for rescue, it’s still early enough for revenge.

What's going on here, Tommy? Has Keffers recruited you for his porn patrol?

Foolishness, sir. How can old wounds heal while maggots linger so richly? Or a peace hold for ever built on slaughter and a magician’s trickery?

Be merciful and leave this place. Leave this country to rest in forgetfulness.

A lot of the time, how you were regarded at Hailsham, how much you were liked and respected, had to do with how good you were at “creating.” Ruth