"“The jerk kids are in one of those backwaters that don’t consider virus writing a crime. Nothing will happen to them.” No, that wasn’t exactly true. If the word ever got out, chances were they would get job offers. Glenn half-believed the antivirus companies were in cahoots with the virus writers. The protection racket updated for the digital age."

"“Do you believe that it’s dangerous?” Doug studied him closely. “Yes, although I’m in a minority here.” “Does that make you question your conclusion?” Glenn grimaced. “No, although it’s been strongly suggested that reconsidering would simplify my life.” “Group think?” Doug said. “Consensus is a poor substitute for thought. Tell the herd to eat shit—a hundred billion flies can’t be wrong.”"

"Lunatics with a speculative bent can sometimes stumble overly close to certain guarded cosmic secrets."

"To destroy wonder and mystery, is to destroy the only elements that make existence tolerable."

"All human thought, all science, all religion, is the holding of a candle to the night of the universe."

"Not as the plants and flowers of Earth, growing peacefully beneath a simple sun, were the blossoms of the planet Lophai. Coiling and uncoiling in double dawns; tossing tumultuously under vast suns of jade green and balas-ruby orange; swaying and weltering in rich twilights, in aurora-curtained nights, they resembled fields of rooted serpents that dance eternally to an other-worldly music."

"For thin is the veil betwixt man and the godless deep. The skies are haunted by that which it were madness to know; and strange abominations pass evermore between earth and moon and athwart the galaxies. Unnameable things have come to us in alien horror and will come again. And the evil of the stars is not as the evil of earth."

"In sheer daemonic strangeness and fertility of conception, Clark Ashton Smith is perhaps unexcelled."

"Smith filled my mind with incredible worlds, impossibly beautiful cities, and still more fantastic creatures."

"Nobody since Poe has so loved a well-rotted corpse."

"Stern and white as a tomb, older than the memory of the dead, and built by men or devils beyond the recording of myth, is the mansion in which we dwell."

"But here, in this place of eternal bareness and solitude, it seemed that life could never have been. The stark, eroded stones were things that might have been reared by the toil of the dead, to house the monstrous ghouls and demons of primal desolation."

"Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams; I crown me with the million-colored sun Of secret worlds incredible, and take Their trailing skies for vestment when I soar, Throned on the mounting zenith, and illume The spaceward-flown horizons infinite."

"Either his desire was too intense to shut out or else I was feeling my own as well as his. What was going on? It was wrong, all wrong. No, it wasn’t wrong, it was right, and that was what was wrong."

"That was the trouble with being an empath; he couldn’t convince himself a woman wanted him unless she really did."

"How do you like that? The future of the universe may be in the hands of a crazy woman."

"That stopped me. I had been so caught up in events, I hadn’t had a chance to think through the ramifications of them all."

"“I do not understand this ‘mountain climbing.’” Shannar glared at Brad as if he had invented the activity rather than just given them the terminology. “What sane person would hammer spikes in a wall and swing from them on a rope?”"

"“Even if I knew ancient warfare, which I don’t, they probably have their own strategies here.” “The strategy is the same everywhere,” she muttered. “Kill.”"

"The progress of the human race could be described as the history of how we didn't know what we didn't know."

"“If this is not sorcery, what is it?” “Technology.”"

"His eyes told him the truth: Lake City was not precisely a ghost town, but the coffin was ready and the hole was dug."

"He talked, and listened, and tried to do the hardest thing of all. He tried to understand."

"He has looked long at the stars, and that is the beginning of wisdom."

"One thing about a science: it works. If an engineer knows his business, his bridge does not fall down."

"Ignorance always carries a price tag."

"In Beverley Hills only the infirm and the senile do not drive their own cars."

"However beautiful, images are only instruments meant to teach truth and inspire contemplation. The realities they struggle to represent are beyond the power of mortals to imagine."

"A man doesn’t volunteer for a hitch in hell just so he can knock off one of the devils."

"Thank you very much for your lesson, but now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to go on, please. Some of us aren’t civil service workers: our time is valuable."

"“And, as a result of this examination,” the forked pink beard smiled down gently from above, “the specialists discovered that what you call the human race was nonviable. That is, while the individuals composing it had strongly developed instincts of self-preservation, the species as a whole was suicidal.” “Suicidal!” I found myself breathing up with rest. “Quite. This is a matter on which there can be little argument from the more honest among you. High civilization is a product of communal living and Man, in groups, has always tended to wipe himself out. In fact, a large factor in the development of what little civilization you do experience has been the rewards contingent upon the development of mass-destruction weapons.”"

"The pull of fashion has always been that of the stampeding herd."

"People quoted Henry Dorselblad’s indictment of modern society: “Women needed the law’s special protection when they were legally inferiors of men. Now they have equality and special protection. They can’t have both!”"

"Don’t be bitter, young sir. If you want to go on living you have to be alert. And you can’t be alert and bitter at the same time."

"“Creatures trained in warfare are what he calls ‘philosophically anti-life.’”"

"Scrabbling like mad at their beloved fence, the politicians tried to avoid taking a definite position on either side."

"Laws produce lawbreakers, Bernie, like hens produce eggs. Civilization has nothing to do with it."

"His clothes, he knew, were in almost ostentatious good taste—they screamed restraint and expensive lowness of key."

"“Take it easy, Fatty, and we'll be all right,” I told him with all the assurance of a bank robber trying to explain to the policeman who caught him that he was only trying to deposit his gun in the vault and the cashiers misunderstood him."

"The real world. As good a name for it as any other. Carter was a mystic never and a Freudian only when the occasion suited him. His credo was simple: anything that is, is real."