Tangled Mind

...treasuring the written words not only for the story they told but for what I saw hidden in them: all the other stories. The stories my mother told. And the stories no one had ever told. [loc. 640]

Maurice had style, panache, courtship, indeed adulation. Johnson had more woolly jerseys, and the recognition due to his profession. If you discerned in his anything remarkable, he forced you to recognise it with the eye of the intellect. [p. 173]

You couldn't say of the anthropologists that they were stoned out of their skulls: but neither were they in the way of dealing with what you might call emergencies. The Booker-Readmans had, at public or finishing school, never even met a Boy Scout. But you would expect, alone in the howling wastelands of Canada, in a deserted railway carriage with the temperature at twenty five under, that the men for the job would be Eskimos. [p.22]

Altogether worse than pain was that maddeningly clear vision of having not tripped, not broken anything, when logic held up a lamp in the straight tunnel that time drove humans through, and showed that the walls were made of glass. [loc 4163]