Keith Roberts

“It's like a...dance somehow, a minuet or a pavane. Something stately and pointless, with all its steps set out. With a beginning, and an end...”

“The years had a way of piling themselves one atop the next, unnoticed and uncounted; that was how young men turned into old ones.”

“A death was more than an ending; it was like pulling a thread from a richly patterned cloth.”

““Confession,” he said, “must be sincere. It must come from the heart. False confession, made to avoid the pain of Questioning, is useless to Church and God alike. Our aim is salvation; the salvation of the souls of these poor wretches in our charge, if necessary by the breaking of their bodies. Set against this, all else is straw in the wind.””

“He like the Church he serves is blind and empty and vainglorious. This God they prattle on about, where’s His justice, where’s His compassion? Does it please Him to see dying people hounded in His name, does He snigger at His bumbling priests, is He satisfied when men drop dead chopping stone out for His temples, twisted little God dying tepid-faced on a cross....She thought, I’ll go out and look for other gods, and maybe they’ll be better and anyway they can’t be worse.”

“She said faintly, “Are you...real?”Amusement showed in his face. “Real?” he said. “Define reality and I can answer you.” He waved a hand. “Look into solid earth, into rock, and see the galaxies of all Creation. What you call reality melts; there is a whirling, a spinning of forces, a dance of motes and atoms. Some of them we call planets, one of them is Earth. Nothingness within nothingness enclosing nothing, that is reality. Tell me what you want, and I can answer.””

“The waves were indifferent, and the wind; and the rocks neither knew nor cared who owned them, Christ’s Vicar or an English King.”

“She curled her lip. She had discovered cynicism.”

“She stopped dead; and the look in her eyes showed plainly she’d just received the import of a crude lesson in economics.”

“It’s a terrible thing, being afraid. It’s like an illness; like wanting to fall down, and not being able to faint. You see you never get used to it. You live with it and live with it and every day it’s worse; and one day it’s the worst of all. I thought, when it...happened, I wouldn’t be afraid. But I was wrong....”