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“The clerk is dying, Rosemund is dying, you’ve all been exposed. Why shouldn’t I give up hope?”

“God has not abandoned us utterly,” he said. “Agnes is safe in his arms.”

Safe, she thought bitterly. In the ground. In the cold. In the dark.

A cage is a safe place as long as nobody has the key.

“Fifty-nine,” Mr. Mowen said. “That’s too many coincidences to just be a coincidence.”

One of the greatest difficulties I encounter in my research is that people want to believe that their dreams mean something, but all the research I’m doing seems to indicate just the opposite.

“In my opinion, dream interpretation as practiced by most Freudian psychiatrists, including some of mine at the Institute, is nothing more than a fancy system of guessing. I think trying to understand the ‘real’ meaning of a dream without reference to the physical state of the dreamer is as pointless as trying to understand what a fever ‘means’ without studying the body.”

“I’m a scientist, not a psychiatrist. I don’t believe dreams have a ‘real’ meaning. They’re a physical process, and any ‘reality’ they have lies in the physical. Freud made no attempt to understand the physical. He felt the key to understanding dream lay in content, and came up with an elaborate system of symbols to explain the images in dreams.”

Do you suppose Walter Hunt would have invented the safety pin if he had known that punk rockers would stick them through their cheeks?

I would never save her. I looked at the woman mopping up the tea, and it came to me that I could not save her either. Enola or the cat or any of them, lost here in the endless stairways and cul-de-sacs of time. They were already dead a hundred years, past saving. The past is beyond saving. Surely that was the lesson the history department sent me all this way to learn. Well, fine, I’ve learned it. Can I go home now?

You’d be amazed how much research you can get done when you have no life whatsoever.

For the first time, I knew what is was to be a natural at something. To have a gift.

Some time later, she leaned over and kissed me. It felt just like all those songs and poems had promised it would. It felt wonderful. Like being struck by lightning.

Most readers, then and now, have at some time experienced the humiliation of being told that their occupation is reprehensible.