How ridiculous were the attentions the weak paid one another in the shadow of the strong! - V. S. Naipaul

My wish for an adventure with Yvette was a wish to be taken up to the skies, to be removed from the life I had – the dullness, the pointless tension, ‘the situation of the country’. It wasn’t a wish to be involved with people as trapped as myself.

Anybody can be decisive during a panic; it takes a strong man to act during a boom.

When the man was totting up the fare, all the de luxe supplements, he worked the sum out twenty times on the adding machine. The same sum, twenty times. Why? Did he think the machine was going to change its mind?