"Things were seldom what they seemed. People feared to tempt powers spiritual or temporal or illegal by displays of well being, and the brick screens in from of (or behind, depending on whether one were going in or going out) the doors blocked both the gaze of the curious and the path of demons. Demons can travel only in straight lines; it is the sons of men whose ways are devious."

"Things oughtn’t to be the way they are, altogether. But letting a madman burn down the barn is no way to improve them."

"Bloodgood Bixbee knew nothing about art, but he knew what he didn’t like."

"Tell him you’ll pay any fine within reason. That dragon-cod can’t even read his own name unless it’s written in gold ink."

"There was an inn...which kept no register of...a number of seamstresses and tailors who lacked time and place and perhaps inclination to weave the cloths they cut and sewed, depending instead on the activities of those who preferred not to vex the original owners with the tiresome bookkeeping inseparable from purchase."

"“Follow me, men! I’m right behind you!”"

"And then in that, admittedly magnificent, abrupt moment you saw what I concede without argument was the face of rather an attractive wench, and—Zeus! you weren’t thinking, man—you were simply reacting. It wasn’t your heart, it was your codpiece that the impulse came from!"

"In general I find little girls enchanting. What a shame they grow up to be big girls and make our lives as miserable as we allow them, and oft-times more."

"“A conscientious and diligent scientist—” “—must remain a continual student,” a deep voice finished the quotation."

"When the records of our civilization are balanced, then—but perhaps not before—the real importance of dental science will be appreciated. Now it is merely valued at the moment of toothache."

"Though you expel Nature with a pitchfork, she will always return."

"Well, rather an ague than a pox. A pox is something one wishes on editors…strange breed, editors. The females all have names like Lulu Ammabelle Smith or Minnie Lundquist Bloom, and the males have little horns growing out of their brows."

"Everything meant something, still, some meanings were revealed sooner than others. And that some were seemingly never revealed in no way disproved the fact."

"The gun is a consequence of our minds. If we were in love with peace, and had no will to destroy each other, there would be no gun."

"So she might die here—well, she could have died anywhere, so who cared where? That didn’t interest her. Life and mystery, that interested her. Perhaps she would have been keener on death and its processes if she’d had a religious side, but to her the religions of the ages were all mixed up in her head, a ceaselessly overworked agglutination of thousands of years of responding to the fears she didn’t possess."

"It is the rare person who can stand aside and observe that our minds and identities are largely constructs of our social order, that we are abstract and arbitrary collections of ideas that resemble dusty archives in the galleries of a museum, visited by nobody, and maintained by a series of those insensible robots that are our habits."

"On the other hand...why was there always an “other hand”?"

"Life did what it did, purposelessly, and only humans strove to impose a meaning where no meaning was needed. She viewed herself as random flotsam upon the face of the deep. Without a religious foundation, she wasn’t bothered by any questions of an insult to God or the hubris of Prometheus that might have arisen."

"I love to live vicariously, in a book or a holo, but I think I can stand one dose of reality before it’s my time."

"Gritter thought it was about time the complacent louts at the top of the heap got to have a genuine red-hot poker up the ass."

"“So, you’re saying you have no idea what this stuff is.” At last, something that sounded plausible."

"Delirium, dream, death—Three-D. What was the fourth?"

"What’s the point of history, if it has nothing to say to the present?"

"You could try and breed territoriality out of the bone, but like a bad fairy it popped up again and again in all sorts of guises and from all kinds of DNA. As long as there was plenty, then everyone was happy to pay culture its due, but as soon as there was trouble—bang, out came the demonization memes and, lo and behold, they were back to the Dark Ages faster than you could say “mattock.”"

"Ayşe Erkoç learned long ago that the secret of doing anything illicit in Istanbul is to do it in full public gaze in the clear light of day. No one ever questions the legitimacy of the blatant."

"The closer they come to the object of desire the more reluctant they are to grasp it. The search is the thing. The process is the purpose. The final mystery can only be anticlimactic. The story is ended."

"It was not socialism or communism or Islamism. It was romanticism. There is no more incandescent passion than love in a time of revolution."

"Economics is the most human of sciences. It is the science of wants and frustrations. It is psychology subject to the abstract, amplifying forces of mathematics."

"Legends should stay legends; otherwise they just become history, when the natural course of things is the other way around, from history to legend."

"He has no belief—faith is beneath his dignity—but he enjoys the designed madness of religion."

"At some point it will inevitably crash again: as weapons of mass destruction go, unrestricted market economies are among the more subtle but sure."

"How proud he would have felt [...] to have seen those seeds germinate into a Muslim nation, a Land of the Pure. How it would have broken his heart to see that Land of the Pure become a medieval theocracy and then rip itself apart in tribal factionalism. The Word of God prophecies from the barrel of an AK47."

"This is now a matter of national security, sir." "This is Franz Kafka, is what it is." Tom Hanks looks at chair-rocker, who writes the name down. "He's a Czech writer," Thomas Lull says. "He's been dead a hundred years. I was attempting irony." "Sir, please do not attempt irony. This is a most serious issue."

"Nationalism, then Islamism, both twentieth-century inventions, destroyed the Greek civilization in Egypt that had endured for three thousand years."

"The elephants fight but the rats go about their business."

"Half your DNA's owned by some biotech corporation. Every time you have sex, you break copyright."

"The laws of economics are subject to the laws of physics. The physical processes that govern this planet and the continued life upon it place as stringent an upper limit on economic growth as the speed of light does on our knowledge of the universe."

"Any aeai [A.I., artificial intelligence ] smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to know to fail it."

"The words still don't move." "The words don't need to move. It is you who is moved by them."

"His theory of golf is, never play any sport that requires you to dress as your grandfather."

"He had sworn on his father's honour, his mother's life, his brother's masculinity, his sister's purity and his prophet's beard that he would never set foot there again. God, knowing people, thinks little of honour or purity or even life, but vows made on his prophet he loves to confound."

"The five minutes ticked away on Limaal Mandella’s fob watch and the tension wound tight around Corporation Plaza. Rael Mandella Jr., sweating in his father’s best championship suit, was horrified to realize how few of such brief five-minute periods went to make up a lifetime."

"Once muddying subjectivities are removed from the issue, the decision becomes clear."

"She had trapped the bird of salvation, sung to it, tamed it and wrung its neck."

"A chilly piety leaked into the air."

"These songs were the true names of things, spoken by the soul, so easily buried under the little busynesses of everyman everyday."

"It was fate, and being angry at fate was as futile as being angry at the weather."

"Ghosts? Pah. We are the most substantial things in the world, the foundations of the present. We are memories."