Ada, or Ador: A Family Chronicle

Fancy flower of paper, found in Aqua’s purse

The first twenty pages were adorned with a number of little plants

in still vague and idle fashion, the science that was to obsess his mature years — problems of space and time, space versus time, time-twisted space, space as time, time as space — and space breaking away from time, in the final tragic triumph of human cogitation: I am because I die

What (Ada asks) are eyes anyway? Two holes in the mask of life.

Endlessly, steadily, delicately, Van would brush his lips against hers, teasing their burning bloom, back and forth, right, left, life, death

‘Are we Mesopotamians?’ asked Lucette.

‘We are Hippopotamians,’ said Van. ‘Come,’ he added, ‘we have not yet ploughed today.’

‘Nicest!’

‘Incest,’ said Ada instantly.

‘I give up,’ said Grace. ‘We need a dictionary to check your little inventions.’

Colonel Erminin, a widower, whose liver, he said in a note, was behaving like a pecheneg;

After her death in 1883, Van computed that in the course of thirteen years,

out of spite and pity