Damascus Gate

"Don't laugh at my fantasies," she said. "Not if you want to be in them."

And that was it, he thought. It was all a series of rooms one never found one's way out of. You had to be content with that, or die, or go completely crazy.

"They don't worry too much if they get the wrong man," Ernest said. "They reckon whoever they get is probably guilty of something. Or would have been eventually. And if he didn't do anything, he probably wanted to."

"Don't go alone to lonely places."

He kept not looking at her. This, Sonia had come to realize, usually meant something, though it was often difficult to decide what. Shyness, morbid hypersensitivity and homicidal racism could all assume the same aspect.

Everyone loses everything in the end.

"The fact is," Nuala said, "we're in different situations. For each of us it's different."

"Lately we seem to get into arguments about what the country's about."

"I thought that was the national pastime."

"It is," Ernest said.

"Over and over our plans foundered on human nature. On the mediocrity of human nature that betrays its better self, its best ideals, that is unworthy of itself everywhere.

"Shocking, the mediocrity of everything - is it not?"

Discretion came hard to Lucas, who tended to think slowly and aloud, but it was time to try a little harder.

"It can't be an easy thing," Lucas said, "to make a country. It's tough enough to make a café. Or to make one be the way you imagined it. Unless you only let certain people in and keep the rest out."

"And stay away from the wrong people."

"You never know who's who," Lucas said.

One wore a brown army-style sweater, extensively darned and full of holes. The darning was old and unraveling; it looked as if someone had once cared enough to repair his sweaters and then just given up.

"Believe only what you know," he said.

"I know that in the United States people are what they choose to be," he said.