When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor on my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backward, the jam will not come together again. (Act 1, Scene 1)

If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra, you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could. (Act 1, Scene 1)

Where there is the familiar pastoral refinement of an Englishman’s garden, here is an eruption of gloomy forest and towering crag, of ruins where there was never a house, of water dashing against rocks where there was neither spring nor a stone I could not throw the length of a... (Act 1, Scene 1)