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?

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

…in bantering lies the key to human warmth.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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.

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?