"“But don’t you think,” I persist, “that it’s better to be extremely happy for a short while, even if you lose it, than to be just okay for your whole life?”"

"Running is many things to me: survival, calmness, euphoria, solitude. It is proof of my corporeal existence, my ability to control my movement through space if not time, and the obedience, however temporary, of my body to my will."

"My family isn’t posh; they’re musicians."

"We should never go to war unless we have been attacked or are under direct, immediate threat of attack. Never. And never again."

"George W. Bush will surely deserve that woolliest of all peace prizes, the Nobel."

"But as usual there’s no answer to this. As usual, that’s just how it is."

"A belief in the purposeful complexity of Fate is always more comforting than random, straightforward facts. This may be why Mother preferred to believe in Atlantis and UFOs rather than in virtually everything else."

"I wrote 87 Goosebumps books. That's a lot of books for a human, isn't it? None of us expected what happened with Goosebumps. We started it in 1992, and by 1994, I was turning out a Goosebumps a month, and it was doing okay for a while. And then it just took off like nothing we'd ever seen. It took off all over the world – not through advertising, hype, or promotions – but just kids telling kids. There's some kind of secret kids network out there. Just kids telling kids about it, and this thing grew everywhere. It was in 28 languages. At one point, after a couple years, we were selling 4 million Goosebumps books a month."

"Yes, I was a funny guy for a long time. When I started out, I just wanted to write humor. I wrote humor for kids. My very first book was called How to be Funny. It was about how to get big laughs at the dinner table and how to get laughs in school. Parents hated this book. I wrote joke books, like A Hundred and One Monster Jokes, and other joke books for years. I did maybe a hundred of them. I had a great time, and I did this humor magazine called Bananas for ten years. It was sort of Mad Magazine, but it was all in color, and it was great. That was all I ever wanted to do. I couldn't believe it. When that ended, I figured I would just coast for the rest of my career. That was it. I'd already done what I wanted to do. I had no idea what was coming up."

"Look, I learned from your uncle that when the universe turns out to be insane, the wise man embraces insanity."

"“This is coercion,” Bruce thundered. The patrolman smiled. “No, sir,” he said. “This is Texas.”"

"How many members of the fleshbound masses do you think will listen to him? He’s making sense, and they don’t respond to that."

"In most Life Situations, the truth is irrelevant. Once in a great while, however, it’s the only thing you've got."

"Death is meaningless unless it happens to someone you know."

"Nowhere in the world can you find a wider variety of empty calories than at any American convenience store."

"Upon finding his quarry, he would learn what he could, make an evaluation, and act accordingly. Then he would tell his superiors whatever they wanted to hear, just as he always had."

"Talent alone is not enough. In the end, Guardian, it is desire that creates a master vintner, makes him into a Vineart. A passion, not for power, or strength, but for the grapes themselves. Anything else leads to ruin."

"And still, the more he learned, the more he became aware that he did not know."

"The painful truth is that while we might have the illusion, none of us are free."

"He is not bound so tightly by tradition that he will refuse a good idea simply for it being new, and not so wild that he would take a bad idea simply because it is new."

"That is the danger of an idea, Jerzy. Once planted, you cannot control where the roots may go."

"Everything else was in the past, and the past no longer mattered."

"He checked, of course. Being sure and being willing to risk that surety against his future were not the same thing."

"Power calls to those who are hungry for power, and there are hungry idiots everywhere."

"Call it not paranoia, but caution."

"The Sin Washer had died centuries ago, and His legacy seemed often to be in the accumulation of connections and power more than the distribution of emotional or spiritual ease. She kept that thought to herself. Wisdom came in many forms, and silence was often the most useful."

"Any change in routine was terrifying, even if it involved less violence rather than more."

"An untrampled scorpion troubles no one."

"No one had ever come for him... not his mom, not his dad, not his brother, not a dozen people who he'd called his friends back in his town on the coast, not a one of them had ever come looking for him, trying to get him back. They'd just let him go. That was the difference. But this castoff cripple-hand civvy girl had come all the way in. Ocho scowled down at her limp body. See what loyalty gets you? See?"

"Disarm to farm."

"They say in the military that a good battle plan can last as long as five minutes in real fighting. After that, it comes down to if the general is favored by fate and the spirits."

"Politics is ugly. Never doubt what small men will do for great power."

"Nature has become something new. It is ours now, truly. And if our creation devours us, how poetic will that be?"

"Laws are a fine thing on paper, but painful when no bribery can ease their bind."

"She does not know how little anyone cares to separate wheat from chaff, when all anyone wants to do is burn a field."

"If you act like a servant, you will die like a dog."

"You're saying that you yoked the world to your patented grains and seeds, happily enslaved us all—and now you finally realize that you are dragging us all to hell."

"The symbol for the Environment Ministry is the eye of a tortoise, for the long view—the understanding that nothing comes cheap or quickly without a hidden cost."

"All life produces waste. The act of living produces costs, hazards and disposal questions, and so the (Environment) Ministry has found itself in the center of all life, mitigating, guiding and policing the detritus of the average person along with investigating the infractions of the greedy and short-sighted, the ones who wish to make quick profits and trade on others’ lives for it."

"If you bargain when they squeeze your balls, they will only squeeze again."

"Food should come from the place of its origin, and stay there. It shouldn’t spend its time crisscrossing the globe for the sake of profit. We went down that path once, and it brought us to ruin."

"Every time he makes plans for his future, he seems to fail. Every time he reaches forward, the world leans against him, pressing him down."

"Nothing is certain—that is the first lesson."

"Laws are confusing documents. They get in the way of justice."

"Sex and hypocrisy. They go together like coffee and cream."

"At first, when California started winning its water lawsuits and shutting off cities, the displaced people just followed the water—right to California. It took a little while before the bureaucrats realized what was going on, but finally someone with a sharp pencil did the math and realized that taking in people along with their water didn't solve a water shortage."

"A desert's a stupid place to put a river."

"We write dust epitaphs for our vanquished enemies and watch them blow away in the desert wind."

"Knowledge is simply a terrible ocean we must cross, and hope that wisdom lies on the other side."

"That's some fucking doorman you've got out there."