"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."

"Woody had more talent than drive, but a musician, even a poor one, was preferable to a fanatic. He could only assault the ear."

"Nemesis, come! And you unfeeling stars, I hurl defiance for reply, and cast into the balance for the world to see my soul ’gainst thy insensate cruelty."

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

"Sorlij tried to imagine a place less organized than this. The concept was a challenge."

"Coyle knew to its core the essence of Charity Stovall, who had lived her twenty years in the lower echelons of Christian belief, a lurid topography with no middle ground. Her theology was banal but rendered in full color, a Caucasian Green Pastures at one end, smoke, fire, pain—the whole Faustian, Exorcist claptrap at the other."

"The nostalgia— not of memories But of what has never been!"

"And I wonder if peace is enough for any man. ..."

"So much do I love wandering, So much I love the sea and sky, That it will be a piteous thing In one small grave to lie!"

"And they shall know that in the ordering Of every world to come the law shall read That he who dares be lawless wears the wing Of bird and prophet and his light shall lead On through the darkness to eventual light, To undiscovered wealth, to newer need. ..."

"Shutting one's eyes is an art, my dear. I suppose there's no use trying to make you see that—but that's the only way one can stay married."

"Work alone qualifies us for life, Sentoni. It is much more exquisite to be blown from the tree as a flower than to be shaken down as a shriveled and bitter fruit."

"This world is a very unsafe place. It's all shifting sands, Ned. Shifting sands and changing winds."

"My life is like water that has gone over the dam and turned no mill wheels. Here I am, not happy, but not unhappy, as my days run on to the sea, idly—but not too swiftly—for I love living."

"Englishmen are like that. They love life more and value it less than any other people in the world."

"I am the wind that wavers, You are the certain land; I am the shadow that passes Over the sand."

"TILLERTON: "To him that hath it shall be given—" She hath ... that's all. That's greatness. PRESCOTT: One sort of greatness, maybe. TILLERTON: Even the great can have only their own sort of greatness. PRESCOTT: And it's often only that they're great sponges. TILLERTON: Often, yes, or great roses for whose blooming the trees have been pruned and stripped. But they make the beauty of the world and that's enough."

"Mine was a love so exquisite that I Rather than watch it wither chose to die: So dress my grave, O friend, with no poor flower Which in your quiet garden blooms an hour!"

"And have we lost the right To look on a blooming bough Without remembering how Once with high promising We were a part of spring— We who are now the dead Leaves of other years strewn where flowers spread?"

"Like a fool I thought I was the arbiter of her destiny; and all the time Fate had happier plans for her."

"It's all right to tell a wife the brutal truth, but you've got to go sort of easy with your lady-love."

"To accuse is so easy that it is infamous to do so where proof is impossible!"

"The Greeks had a word for it."

"Forgetting is the cost Of living cheerfully."

"I know not where I go; I scarcely feel The menacing fatigue about my feet, The skies that scourge, the distances that cheat, the constant wounds that never hurt nor heal."

"No one can ever help loving anyone."

"My cousin Cleofante does not believe in inspiration. She shuns the false energy of all stimulants, even those of criticism and sympathy, when she sets herself to a task. What she does, she does alone—unencouraged, unadvised, unmoved. She has a man’s broad and vital technique, and a man’s ability for thinking straight and far. For years I have watched her work,—coldly, intelligently, solely with the power of her brain,—achieving effects that are in no way miracles, but are matters of technique and deliberation."

"Indifferent to all the fun of chance I watched black spiders of inertia spin The far-flung web which I was strangling in."

"... there's a great strangeness about love. ... Yes, I'm very sure that love is the strangest thing in the world—much stranger than death—or—or just life."

"In all my locked-up songs No one but you belongs."

"The success haters. ... That's what I call them—the people who have never got what they want and turned sour on everybody who has. The world's full of them. ... As soon as you've made good they begin to watch for you to fail. ..."

"Risk meaningless death at the hands of a soulless corporate entity? Hmmm. How much are they paying?"

"Well, that happens in fairy tales, doesn’t it? In real life, when a manager fucks up and ruins a million working people’s lives, when he bungles so badly the company loses a decade’s profits, his Christmas bonus turns up a little short. That’s all."

"A woman’s laughter can charm a man out of his senses."

"There’s always a moment of transition for you, that one moment when you turn from outsider to in, when you leave your past behind and suddenly mesh with the new life you’ve joined."

"Thinking about death’s a funny thing. Stupid. Like wondering where you were before you were born."

"Human society begins with what nature makes male and female mammals want from each other."

"Seduction’s so easy when its target has the same object in mind."

"War, they say, is just business conducted through other means."

"That’s all I remember, really. We fly around. I shoot the guns. The explosions are pretty. People die. What the hell are they fighting for? Freedom? What the hell is that? You’re born out of nothing. You live for a while. You die. You go back to nothing. What kind of fool dies for a word? A better class of fool than the one who dies for a paycheck? Don’t know."

"Idle relics of the past. Things that let us imagine we’ve lived, when nothing else remains."

"Remember that there are elements of your personality you are totally unaware of that are immediately apparent to any stranger within five minutes of meeting you"

"...in isolation, human minds tend to get strange, like a self-portrait painted from memory, in the dark, using a live snake as a brush."

"There's an old saying that a child not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth. I'd update it to say the child not sufficiently entertained by the village will burn it down for the spectacle."

"Your heroes aren't gods, they're just regular people who probably got good at one thing by neglecting literally everything else."

"It hadn't occurred to me that my mother would die. Until she was dying, the thought had never entered my mind. She was monolithic and insurmountable, the keeper of my life. She would grow old and still work in the garden. The image was fixed in my mind, like one of the memories from her childhood that I'd made her explain so intricately that I remembered it as if it were mine. She would be old and beautiful like the black-and-white photo of Georgia O'Keeffe I'd once sent her. I held fast to this image for the first couple weeks after we left the , and then, once she was admitted to the wing of the hospital in Duluth, that image unfurled, gave way to others, more modest and true."

"... a secret inside myself was that I had to be a writer. Ever since I learned how to read when I was six or seven, I just knew: this was my thing — this was my calling. This is what I was going to do in the world."

"... For three months she hiked 1,100 miles alone along the , a continuous wilderness undulating from Mexico to Canada over nine mountain ranges – the to the . ... On her epic trek, this novice hiker faced temperatures of 100 degrees in the shade on the and record snowfalls in the high sierras, not to mention bears, rattlesnakes and failed waterholes. ..."

"No, the Saurons were careful to stop short of complete annihilation, not because they had a system of ethics, but because they needed the survivors. Needed slaves to construct the enormous citadel-like fortresses within which a new generation of Saurons would hatch, each killing its progenitor during the birth process, and each taking its place within the complex racial hierarchy upon which the alien culture had been built. A social structure in which each caste had a distinct function: The Zin governed, the Kan fought, and the Fon performed menial work, or would have performed menial work had it not been for the diminutive Ra 'Na, a slave race upon which the aliens were heavily dependent. A relationship which over hundreds of years had become so entrenched that something approaching a symbiotic relationship had evolved. A reality that helped explain why many of the whip-wielding Fon overseers carried Ra 'Na technicians on their chitin-covered backs even as they forced thousands of humans to ascend Hell Hill."

"The worst damage was inflicted by powerful energy cannons mounted on Sauron spaceships. Dreadnoughts that measured almost a mile in length, were more than two thousand feet wide, and carried upward of twenty thousand aliens plus the slaves required to support them. Though unable to descend through the atmosphere, the largest battleships had no difficulty firing their weapons from space itself. Earth's atmosphere shrieked in protest each time a bolt of energy tore through the air. Those located within a half mile of the impact experienced a chest-thumping concussion, and if they were fortunate enough to survive, could watch skyscrapers toppple, bridges collapse, and entire neighborhoods erupt into flame. The fires spread to suburbs, grasslands, forests, and jungles. Soon the entire planet was wrapped in a blanket of thick gray smoke."