"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."

"We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else."

"Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering."

"Be happy -- if you're not even happy, what's so good about surviving?"

"If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music and of aviation."

"Age is a very high price to pay for maturity."

"When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?"

"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."

"People do terrible things to each other, but it's worse in the places where everybody is kept in the dark."

"Life in a box is better than no life at all... I expect."

"Confession is an act of violence against the unoffending."