Loyalty is a continuous phenomenon, you don't score points for past action,

The creeping sense that he might have seen him reading the book came up from the ground, but that was more anxiety than evidence.

Everybody, professors and students and Proctors the same, knew that if the sign said 'do not walk on the grass', one hopped. Anybody who didn't had failed to understand what Oxford was.

Mori looked across and was, briefly, a languageless, inhuman thing rescued from the sea and asked for an impious favour.

It is not summer, England doesn't have summer, it has continuous autumn with a fortnight's variation here and there.

I tell him his business, all business, is legalized throat-cutting, like marriage is legalized fornication.

The ocean is six miles deep.

There is no power on earth more formidable than the truth.

Reflect that in reality you have a greater need to serve [the poor] than they have of your service.

All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much.

You were so busy trying to be my savior that you left me all alone.

You can climb too high for your own good. Linger too long at high altitudes and your hearing dulls and your eyesight dims.

For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.

I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.