“There were no oceans on Oasis, no large bodies of water, and presumably no fish. He wondered whether this would cause comprehension problems when it came to certain crucial fish-related Bible stories. There were so many of those: Jonah and the whale, the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, the Galilean disciples being fishermen, the whole ‘fishers of men’ analogy . . . the bit in Matthew 13 about the kingdom of heaven being like a net cast into the sea, gathering fish of every kind . . . Even in the opening chapter of Genesis, the first animals God made were sea creatures. How much of the Bible would he have to give up as untranslatable?”

“'A Christmas Carol' is an extravagantly symbolic thing - as rich in symbols as Christmas pudding is rich in raisins.”

“Well, here we are."Sometimes a statement of the bloody obvious was the only appropriate way forward. As if to give life ceremonious permission to proceed.”

“Proof, once again, that reality was not objective, but always waiting to be reshaped and redefined by one's attitude.”

“The past was dwindling, like something shrinking to a speck in the rear-view mirror, and the future was shining through the windscreen, demanding her full attention.”

“A person who is worth nothing must introduce you to a person worth next-to-nothing, and that person to another, and so on and so forth until finally you can step across the threshold, almost one of the family.”

“A single day spent doing things which fail to nourish the soul is a day stolen, mutilated, and discarded in the gutter of destiny.”

“But miracles are not for the asking; they come only when the stern eyes of God droop shut for a moment, and Our Lady takes advantage of His inattention to grant an illicit mercy. God...is an Anglican, whereas Our Lady is of the True Faith; the two of Them have an uneasy relationship, unable to agree on anything, except that if They divorce, the Devil will leap gleefully into the breach.”

“How’s things, man?” The black man extended his hand for a handshake. Mathematical formulae were jotted on the sleeve of his shirt, right up to the elbow.“Very good,” said Peter. It had never occurred to him before that dark-skinned people didn’t have the option of jotting numbers on their skin. You learned something new about human diversity every day.”

“These days, the bigger the company, the less you can figure out what it does.”

“People and their dwellings were such a thin dust on the surface of the globe, like invisible specks of bacteria on an orange, and the feeble lights of kebab shops and supermarkets failed utterly to register on the infinities of space above.”