fiefoe

The protagonist is quite a sympathetic character: high-spirited rogue and zestful curmudgeon all at once.

Between you and me, I find it almost impossible to guess breakfast requirements in advance for women like Cécile.
Best of all, you get to wake up and be the first person that day to see the true untroubled beauty of a woman's face-brow clear, hair unfussed. (_"She is all states, and all princes, I, /Nothing else is.")
It cost me more than any other human being in the history of mankind has ever paid for a single fish, but life is short and inconvenient and there is no sense protesting.
Which was locked. <> Oh, for heaven's sake. Must the human condition be forever frustration and inarticulate wrath at the sheer injustice of it all? ... There was nothing else for it. I would have to go all the way round to the other entrance at the opposite end of the garden.
Honey and cider performed reliably as ever, and I was almost sprung from my deathtrap by the surprise appearance of a troupe of parsnips that arrived at the last minute to the zesty tune of a lemon juice march.
Never again shall the breathtaking banality of Western liberal capitalism steal away my will to live.

a misplaced sense of metropolitan guile that he derives from knowing the timetable and routes
(in the Tube:) I find that the speculations set off by the presence of so many strangers, none of whom I actually have to talk to, somehow stimulate my mind and serve to make me slightly more receptive, slightly more implicated.
the moral high ground - that most unscenic of human viewpoints
Gape as she prizes horoscopes' over history, as she seizes sentiment from the flames of emotion and clutches to her bosom a sheaf of charred parlor fads!
Somehow I struggled on through the swampy undergrowth of the conversation, thoughts and feelings held in a rucksack high above my head to save them from the mire
what the taxi masters are really looking for is someone who is also physically repulsive from the back. Someone who is instantly, biologically repugnant when looked at from the rear. Aaahhh ... now that's special, that's flair.
No tearful reveries at the sheer loneliness of Planet Earth putting a brave face on things out on the edge of oblivion, with only a pair of overwashed and thinning Y-fronts otherwise known as the ozone layer to protect its modesty.
that soft benighting of the mind otherwise known as affection
Truly love is three parts selfishness to every one part superstition.
Nobody worries about the end in the beginning. (Not even God - clearly.)
Hecate has a heart of frozen venom, and even were there man alive to melt it, he would be sure to die from the poison vapors.

"The Calligrapher"