“In the half-century of his life, a tick on the Doomsday clock, he had borne witness to the most unbelievable technological advances. He had started off listening to an old Bush radio in the corner of the living room and now he had a phone in his hand on which he could pretend to throw a scrunched-up piece of paper into a waste bin. The world had waited a long time for that.”

“Men had no purpose on earth whereas women were gods walking unrecognized among them.”

“Sometimes it was harder to change the past than it was the future.”

“And with a massive roar the fifth wall comes down and the house of fiction falls, taking Viola and Sunny and Bertie with it. They melt into thin air and disappear. Pouf!”

“The clock had been Sylvie's, and her mother's before that. It had gone to Ursula on Sylvie's death and Ursula had left it to Teddy, and so it had zigzagged its way down the family tree......The clock was a good one, made by Frodsham and worth quite a bit, but Teddy knew if he gave it to Viola she would sell it or misplace it or break it and it seemed important to him that it stayed in the family. An heirloom. ('Lovely word,' Bertie said.) He liked to think that the little golden key that wound it, a key that would almost certainly be lost by Viola, would continue to be turned by the hand of someone who was part of the family, part of his blood. The red thread.”

“All the birds who were never born, all the songs that were never sung and so can only exist in the imagination.And this one is Teddy's.”

“She had married him in order to be safe from the chaos. He had married her, she now understood, for the same reason. They were the last two people on earth who could make anyone safe from anything.”

“... Angus had a "pretty normal childhood." Bertie had immediately mistrusted him. Nobody had a normal childhood.”

“...and no man gave you a fur coat without expecting to receive something inreturn. Except for one's husband, of course, who expected nothing beyond modest gratitude.”

“He had been very keen on Esperanto, which had seemed an absurd eccentricity at the time but now Ursula thought it might be a good thing to have a universal language, as Latin had once been. Oh, yes, Miss Woolf said, a common language was a wonderful idea, but utterly utopian. All good ideas were, she said sadly.”

“Numinous," Ursula said, breaking the silence eventually. "There's a spark of the divine in the world -- not God, er'er done with God, but something. Is it love? Not silly romantic love, but something more profound...""I think it's perhaps something we don't have a name for," Teddy said. "We want to name everything. Perhaps that's where we've gone wrong.""'And whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.' Having dominion over everything has been a terrible curse."Afterwards -- because it turned out there was an afterwards for Teddy -- he resolved that he would try always to be kind. It was the best he could do. It was all that he could do. And it might be love, after all.”