It [i.e., his look] held the fatal mixture of stupidity and cunning that lurks at the bottom of all evil. - Brian Aldiss

He began talking to an imagined woman, achieving an eloquence that was never his when he was face to face with anyone else.

When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults.

Irreconcilables: he should stay here and conform; he should — not stay here (remembering no time when he was not here, Harley could frame the second idea no more clearly than that). Another point of pain was that "here" and "not here" seemed to be not two halves of a homogeneous whole, but two dissonances.