"“We’re here with Judas Iscariot on the fringe of the delirious demonstration for Roy Stride. Judas, can you comment on the meteoric rise of Stride and the White Paladins?” Judas reached through the cab window and fetched his cap. “I’d say the hopeless schmucks have found the kind of government they deserve. Always do.”"

"“You must have been an evangelical.” “Tabernacle of the Born Again Savior,” Charity owned with wistful pride. “Not that it helped a whole lot.” “Indeed.” Jake sank again in his chair. “Tabernacle of the…the more shriveled the existence, the more elaborate the credentials. Virtue measured by what you wouldn’t do, at least under scrutiny, and others judged for what they would and got caught at. You don’t want Grace, Miss Stovall. You want to get even.”"

"Judas shrugged. “He’s taking their own fear, frustration and anger and selling it back to them with a new ribbon around it. Easy answers, easy targets: out with the Jews and blacks, down with the intellectuals, which means anyone who’s better off or disagrees with them. Slogans, marching bands and the promise of blood. How can he miss?”"

"Paranoia, the common cold of neurosis. The paranoiac, perceiving all external stimuli as threat, needs to see his enemies, not merely sense their external presence. Being imaginary, these threats must be fleshed out to visible targets, the more clearly defined the better."

"Look, these clowns need a messiah because the truth of the world always goes down easier with a few miracles and a lot of blood. It’s a very old game, the rules don’t change. I’d say Stride is a flaming, fourteen-karat folk hero. Look at this crowd; you’re not talking about contented, mature people. You ever see a happy man who needed to conquer the world?"

"If respectability is the daughter of morality, her jealous sister is blackmail."

"Subconsciously aware of the fragility of his artificial reality, the paranoiac must ever reinforce its defenses with more and more elaborate rationale. His virtues must be defined, his enemies painted in primary colors. The basic motive of fear is raised to mystic proportion; a cause, uniform, a symbol. He proclaims his purposes one with God’s. “No—” The central infection inflames and eventually mortifies the entire psyche until any healthy stimulus becomes alien."

"Infantile, needing to be the center and reason for creation, the less educated or advantaged subject needs a distorted miraculous theology to support a perilous existence, externally and constantly threatened as it is by “them.”"

"It wasn’t your usual vacation. But what’s so bad, Char? I’ve seen heaven and you’ve seen hell, and they’re just what? Common sense, funny and horrible with a lot of bullshit thrown in, just like the six o’clock news."

"Lengthy memos were always coming down from somewhere to be read, initialed and passed on. Never less than ten single-spaced pages, they boiled down to the need for efficiency and cutting paperwork."

"Roy’s a fuck-up like Hitler. What’s the opposite of fail-safe? Success-safe. These turkeys have got to lose because most of their thinking is off the wall to begin with. Think about it: there’s Adolf rearranging Europe like a hyperactive housewife, shrewd as they come, and still getting his horoscope done every goddamned day, which is like seriously figuring Santa Claus into the national budget. These people are not coming from common sense; they simply can’t think big."

"Hell, there’s no mystery between men and women, except why some poor damn fool like me ain’t figured that out yet."

"Panic poisons; levelheaded lives."

"Life is a prison if you cannot leave it as you like."

"You look all right to me, although may be a bit wiggly about the edges. But perhaps I just need coffee."

"Crackpot Hall has eleven thousand rooms, but only one potty."

"If your head explodes, I am not cleaning it up."

"I shook my head. I had been too busy panicking to do anything that sensible."

"Nini Mo says that most courage comes from being too tired and hungry to be afraid anymore. If exhaustion and hunger were the hallmarks of courage, then I was the bravest person that ever lived."

"It’s amazing what a little maquillage can do for you, particularly if you don’t lay it on with a trowel."

"“How easily you men forget, even when you tell yourselves you are ‘in love,’ whatever idiocy that phrase may convey to your superstitious and romantic little mind!”"

"He was that kind of man; every now and then you meet a person who is real, who exists as he is rather than within and behind a mask or three, and within a few minutes you’ve been old friends for twenty years."

"I always thought Man might have grown up if Freud and Darwin and Havelock Ellis had lived before Napoleon and Watt and Marco Polo. And the schlemiel who invented gunpowder."

"It sounded like a dream. I’d always cherished such a notion: doers conquering parasites and taking over! At the time I left America/Earth—well, skip it. You don’t need me to tell you that those of us who worked and paid taxes were slaves to those who didn’t."

"In a “barbarian” society (or in any society, in wartime), the conquerors naturally rape ever woman in sight. Not even the stern old lonely god of the children of Abraham frowned on that practice!"

"He gave them a sardonic grin, the old wicked look they knew he cultivated. “In case the luck of Berneson ends right now, it’s been sheer boredom knowing you two.”"

"To call her a strange woman would be to say that Einstein was a bright fellow."

"I’d have been better off of course, just to have gone along, to have accepted. But as I have pointed out I am not built that way. I kept asking why."

"Getting fresh palm fronds on this planet is rare, and even if we manage to find one, will the rain gods hear our chants at all, despite being light years away from home?"

"If only Amadioha would bless us again. Bless us with the rainmaking gift of our fathers."

"The gods go where we go,the palm fronds are props. We will call our gods with whatever is native to this planet, and they will answer. We know from experience that sometimes, they answer a little too well."

"All we need is some water and this whole planet would be one big, beautiful garden."

"Geological records show that millions of years ago, Arid was a green planet and there were only a few deserts in her solar overlap zone."

"...The current scientific consensus is that Arid’s desertification and the extinction of most of its lifeforms were likely due to a rare and destructive shift in its solar orbit, which triggered a series of dual solar hyper-flares."

"The abundance of organic matter is why the planet has so much fossil fuel deposits and a rich soil."

"The familiar sense of peace rises inside, and my hands stretch toward the piano. And then I play."

"I know no good comes from comparing what I have to what they have, but seeing all that money and privilege, and having none, hurts. I try to convince myself that being a scholarship kid doesn’t matter, that I shouldn’t care."

"Even though I know I shouldn’t care, it annoys me that when girls know what they want and how they’re going to get it, they’re seen as cocky. But guys who know what they want? They’re confident or strong."

"Perhaps if hierarchies weren’t so important and people weren’t constantly trying to take me down, maybe I’d be more trusting of people, and Ava and I would be more than just two girls using each other to survive high school."

"Most people think the three of us are friends, since we’re almost always seen together. But we’re not friends. Our relationship is a transaction."

"High school is like a kingdom, only instead of temperamental royals, golden thrones, and designer outfits flown in from Europe, the hallways are filled with loud postpubescent teens, the classrooms with rows of wooden desks and students dressed in ugly plaid skirts, navy-colored slacks, and stiff blue blazers."

"It’s an insane idea, yes, but hell, this is war. If insanity works, a general is duty-bound to use it."

"Stephen knew I first served the Church by stocking reliquaries—transmuting unused bits of rotting paupers into the toes and teeth of saints."

"People will say bout anything. That don’t mean I have to believe it. What I see with my own eyes, that I believe."

"Oh, those sanctified fields and vineyards, always heard of but never seen! Surely there, we thought, the starving could pluck and eat in peace, free of the pious prattle that we choked down with our meals in Rome. In this we were correct. As I rose higher in the church, the meals grew more substantial and the piety less burdensome. I saw the lame and the dying leaping like frogs around a finger bone that had been fondling a milkmaid not two weeks before."

"I knew this way well. It was the track to the praying ground, where are the colored folks on that part of St. Helena met to have their Christian worship, far from white men and their devilments. What there is bout a colored church service that so riles up the white trash, I didn’t know then and I don’t know now, cept maybe they hate to see us going straight to the true Master, you know, and skipping the middleman."

"She didn’t look around as I slammed the front door and locked it, just like I promised I’d do—cept I was outside the door, on the porch, when I done it."