Blessed are the insulted and the shat upon,’ Barbie said. ‘For they shall inherit the kingdom of Heaven, which is currently under offer with vacant possession.

He said history was a sum of situations whose significance was never seen until long afterwards because people had been afraid to act them out. They couldn’t face up to their responsibility for them. They preferred to think of the situations they found themselves in as part of a general drift of events they had no control over, which meant that they never really understood those situations, and so in a curious way the situations did become part of a general drift of events.

It is said that he spoke the language of the greased palm, and this language is international.

Well, life is not just a business of standing on dry land and occasionally getting your feet wet. It is merely an illusion that some of us stand on one bank and some on the opposite. So long as we stand like that we are not living at all, but dreaming. So jump, jump in, and let the shock wake us up. Even if we drown, at least for a moment or two before we die we shall be awake and alive.

If God is never happy what chance of happiness is there for us?

There are images that stay vividly in your mind, even after many years: images coupled with the feeling that at the same time came to you. Sometimes you can know that such an image has been selected to stay with you forever out of the hundreds you every day encounter.

How can people be punished when they are innocent?

What a lot you know.’ I laughed and said it was one of the few advantages of old age, to be a repository of bits and pieces of casual information that sometimes come in useful. But she said she didn’t really mean that, she meant know as distinct from remember.

It was extraordinary, Ahmed thought, how men distinguished in one field – and he assumed that Pandit Baba Sahib was distinguished – seemed to claim for themselves wisdom in all spheres of human activity; wisdom and the right to make pronouncements which they expected you to listen to and learn from.

The structure of a friendship is seldom submitted to analysis until it comes under pressure;.