This morning I saw her lipstick on
a coffee cup and felt like I had
never known a bruise.

I smelled her before I saw her. Even so, the first sight was shocking.

She could have never believed in the morning that her colorless inner world would before night become as animated as water under a microscope.

She grunted. “Nothing unusual?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, if you ask me, that’s pretty unusual right there, if a body was smart enough to notice it.”

She did what no one had thought possible.

[On Margaret Thatcher] She was a bizarre character. She was one of the most unlikely human beings I ever met.
If you'd told me that this woman would become Prime Minister, I mean no dislike of her at all, I'd have thought that was ridiculous.

She always had been in touch with something outside of human ken. She had something in her no other human had. You sensed it, but you could not name it, for there was no name for this thing she had. And she had fumbled with it, trying to use it, not knowing how to use it, charming off the warts and healing poor hurt butterflies and only God knew what other acts that she performed unseen.

I would never have supposed that inexperienced girl was capable of such cold-blooded, calculating manipulation!

There was something strange and extraordinary about her – something that was frightening and at the same time most exciting.

Oh, it was a real shock when we saw the Creature. And you can see from the pictures in the book that I look a little awestruck, kind of taken aback when I saw it at first. I thought it was quite wonderful, extraordinary, and a little scary which of course is exactly what is was supposed to be.

No one had been more surprised than me by the arrival of the Great Panjandrum when I pulled the emergency handle. For the nonbelievers it was something of a shock, but not any less than for the faithful. She had been so long a figure of speech that seeing her in the flesh was something of a shock. I thought she had seemed quite plain and in her midthirties, but Humpty-Dumpty told me later he had been shaped like an egg. In any event, the marble statue that now stands in the lobby of the Council of Genres depicts the Great Panjandrum as Mr. Price the stonemason saw him—with a leather apron and carrying a mallet and stone chisel.