We’re not patients or soldiers!” I yelled. “We just work here. And when we took our jobs nobody said, ‘Incidentally, the real reason we’re hiring you… - Rupert Holmes

"The same way death ought to come," added Dobson, almost wistfully. "No time for last words, apologies, retractions, rewrites. The good you did, the mess you made, that's what lives on."

When a man dies from a bullet entering his chest, it’s a homicide. When a man dies from a meteorite landing on his head, it’s a tragedy. Don’t use bullets. Use meteorites. Don’t commit a homicide. Commit a tragedy.

what were my impressions upon viewing for the first time the manor where you’d had me brought? My initial thought was “Toad Hall.” This was, of course, an inadequate comparison but the best I could muster considering the limited number of books I’d read that centered on soaring Gothic structures. (As a boy, I went nine pages into The Hunchback of Notre Dame before realizing it wasn’t a football story.)