You are a stone, thrown upon a lake. But the ripples you create will never make you still.

This city is like no other city in the world. It is brilliant but it is bloated, and I've never called it home

The turnip cannot thrive in the tulips patch of soil.

The rules of this house are written in water. I must either sink or swim.

Because, Petronella - it's something in his soul. It's something in his soul and you can't get it out.

All we can do if we're lucky is stich up the mistakes other people make.

That may be. But to decide that I was never going to live as a proper woman was not your choice to make.' 'What do you mean a proper woman?' 'A proper woman marries - she has children -' 'Then what does that make me? Am I not a proper woman? Last time I looked I certainly was.

Love your children, for they are the seeds that will make this city bloom.

Words are water in this city. One drop of rumour could drown us.

Take care, take care. This city thrives! It's money gives you wings to soar. But it is a yoke on your shoulders and you would do well to take note of the bruise around your neck.

Believe it or don't believe it, Madame. But my feet are tired too. Bloody tired. Like a dead man's.

We're nothing more than prisoners to your desire.

The ink was secret nectar, for Marin isn't married.

There are horizons through the brickwork, you wait and see.

What was once, is no longer.

The night darkens, the stars unfriendly, the cold a knife upon her neck - but Nella waits, until she can no longer difference between Johannes and the darkness that carries him away.

Neighbours watching neighbours, twisting ropes to bind us all.

From little seeds great flowers grow.

I feel younger than eighteen but burdened as a eighty-year-old.

There was no need for a term like ‘magical thinking’ in the Golden Age of Man...there was only genuine everyday magic and mysticism. Children were not mocked or scolded in those days for singing to the rain or talking to the wind.

There are some people to whom muddled thinking and self-deception are the two most unforgivable crimes in the world.

I feel separated and cut off from the world around me, but occasionally I've felt that it was really a part of me, and I hope I'll have that feeling again, and that next time it won't go away. That's a dim, misty outline of the story that's told so often, of how man once lived in a golden age or a garden of Eden or the Hesperides ... how that world was lost, and how we some day may be able to get it back again. ... This story of the loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.