"Just then, for an instant, the film of reality slipped off the spokes of its projector. Everything went completely askew and then righted itself again as if nothing had happened."

"When he graduated he’d thought life was going to be like a novel, starring him on his own personal hero’s journey, and that the world would provide him with an endless series of evils to triumph over and life lessons to learn. It took him a while to figure out that wasn’t how it worked."

"It was so easy to ignore people when you understood how little power they really had over you."

"He had no interest in TV anymore—it looked like an electronic puppet show to him, an artificial version of an imitation world that meant nothing to him anyway."

"We have reached the point where ignorance and neglect are the best we can hope for in a ruler."

"“Age,” Quentin heard him mutter. “It’s wasted on the young. Just like youth.”"

"She’d gotten good at coaxing. If all else failed she had the power of the bathroom handjob, and she wielded it with an iron fist."

"This was bad behavior, and she knew it. She did it because she was angry and because she disliked herself. The more she disliked herself, the more she took it out on other people, and the more she took it out on other people the more she disliked herself."

"“You’re an interesting case,” she said. There is really no end to life’s little humiliations, Quentin reflected."

"His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling."

"“Are you smart?” There was no non-embarrassing answer to this. “I guess.” “Don’t worry about it, everybody here is. If they even brought you in for the Exam you were the smartest person in your school, teachers included. Everyone here was the cleverest little monkey in his or her particular tree. Except now we’re all in one tree together. It can be a shock. Not enough coconuts to go round. You’ll be dealing with your equals for the first time in your life, and your betters. You won’t like it.”"

"Once magic was real everything else just seemed so unreal."

"His crush went from exciting to depressing, as if he’d gone from the first blush of infatuation to the terminal nostalgia of a former lover without even the temporary relief of an actual relationship in between."

"“The Dean will probably be down to get you in another minute,” Eliot said. “Here’s my advice. Sit there…and try to look like you belong here. And if you tell him you saw me smoking, I will banish you to the lowest circle of hell. Which I’ve never been there, but if even half of what I hear is true it’s almost as bad as Brooklyn.”"

"He’d spent too long being disappointed by the world—he’d spent so many years pining for something like this, some proof that the real world wasn’t the only world, and coping with the overwhelming evidence that it in fact was."

"Quinton didn’t know exactly how to put everything that was ridiculous about that idea in a single sentence."

"A gang of wild turkeys patrolled the edge of the forest, upright and alert, looking oddly saurian and menacing, like a lost squadron of velociraptors."

"But walking along Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, in his black overcoat and his gray interview suit, Quentin knew he wasn’t happy. Why not? He had painstakingly assembled all the ingredients of happiness. He had performed all the necessary rituals, spoken the words, lit the candles, made the sacrifices. But happiness, like a disobedient spirit, refused to come. He couldn’t think what else to do."

"All of it just confirmed his belief that his real life, the life he should be living, had been mislaid through some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy. This couldn’t be it. It had been diverted somewhere else, to somebody else, and he’d been issued this shitty substitute faux life instead."

"Most people are blind to magic. They move through a blank and empty world. They’re bored with their lives, and there’s nothing they can do about it. They’re eaten alive by longing, and they’re dead before they die."

"“Maybe he was lying,” Peters said. “Lie is a blow to the tyranny of fact,” Hollis said…. “I think lies are good,” he said. “People should lie more. Lies are like these little peepholes into a better world.”"

"…it’s like he’s opening the covers of a book, but a book that did what books always promised to do and never actually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into somewhere better."

"“If there’s a bright side to the galaxy,” Peter said, more or less aimlessly, “we’re on the planet that’s farthest from it.”"

"“A Man, a Plan, a Bacchanal: Anomie,” said Peters, grandly."

"But now that the ripened fruit of all that preparation was right in front of him he suddenly lost any desire for it. He wasn’t surprised. He was used to this anticlimactic feeling, where by the time you’ve done all the work to get something you don’t even want it anymore. He had it all the time. It was one of the few things he could depend on."

"“Well,” she announced cheerfully, “he’s dead!”"

"“I was just getting comfortable,” she said. “Gimme another sec.” “You can have all the sex you want.”"

"Anyway, you think for yourself. And if a man can’t do that, he isn’t really thinking."

"But if I feared it, I faced up to it anyway. A man’s got to be a man sometime. You show me one who was nair afraid, and I’ll right away show you one that nair in his life came up against aught to fear."

"I don’t rightly know today whether I was scared at that time. A thing can come along and happen to you, and you don’t have the time to make up your mind if you’re scared, because there’s so almighty much else you’ve got to tend to somehow."

"Got some dirty tricks? If that’s how it is, you done drove your ducks to the wrong puddle."

"By now the rain rushed down instead of fell down. It was like what my old folks used to call raining tomcats and hoe handles."

"“But I ain’t made up my mind on hell, not yet. Maybe it’s truly a-burning away, down below our feet, right this minute.” “Or either, the fire down in there is what made folks decide what hell was.”"

"Mind your feet, don’t stumble, and don’t be afraid. Because there never was a better time not to be afraid."

"“If you drop a hook in, you’ll get a bite right quick,” I said. “Maybe not the biggest fish, but the best fighter. They’d fight one another to take the hook.” “There’s some sort of parable to that thought,” she said, not air way cheerfully. “How life gives you something you think is good and wholesome, and then uses it to yank you out of your world.”"

"Weather was a-getting ready to happen."

"Ian got up and looked around. Sicker than the stories themselves was the way they were told, full of verve and energy—as if it actually mattered. He hated to hear gamers spilling their guts, trying to sound bad. All it showed was how totally delusional they were. The most elemental rule of gaming was that if you die, you lose—your original stake is gone. You have to give up, or buy your way back in. This tough talk amounted to a bunch of chronic losers bucking themselves up by boasting about how badly they had lost. Somehow he had to win."

"“This isn’t fair.” “Hell, no! It’s democracy.”"

"Nothing beats going to bed dead and waking up alive."

"Smack, crack, crank, speed, booze, acid, has, bhang, poppies, and belladonna; none of the above (or all of them taken at once) had even half the addictive power of gaming."

"Staring into the face of a corpse is sure to make one question where life is headed."

"“Gambling houses stay in business by making it pleasant, even exciting, to lose,” said Aaron. “They treat the loser like a king, providing him with food and drink in a luxurious setting, allowing women of easy virtue to rub up against him. They will ply the loser with every pleasure known to men so he may give up his money and come back when he has more. Most gamblers lose. Not one in twenty has a bank account. Some play poker like assassins, and throw their winnings away on the ponies. Winning takes hard work and strict accounting. Losing is open to all. That is the secret of losing.”"

"The king is free to call his greed taxation, and his misdeeds justice."

"A man makes his mark as much by the quality of his enemies as by the quality of his friends."

"He is a Nevada senator, a pimp, and a railroad lawyer; all three professions having much the same qualifications. He is also a saloonkeeper, but no man in Nevada is anything unless he is also a saloonkeeper."

"A single truth well-told did the work of a dozen lies."

"We tend to view history not as it was, but as we think it should have been."

"Dieter had the true Gypsy contempt for governments, plunging their people into one holocaust after another, calling each new disaster leadership. Or statescraft."

"He took her upstairs to Guido’s big tiled shower. “I will show you the greatest luxury of this century—it almost makes up for the two World Wars.” Turning on the hot water, he sprinkled bath herbs on the tiles. The stall filled with scented steam. Slowly, he undressed her. Kathe’s skin was stark white under the electric light, smelling of excitement and caked with dirt; in the whole time they had been together, Kathe had bathed only once, in the cold waters of the Rhine. He positioned her under the hot cascade from the shower nozzle, her bare hips pressed against the hard warm tiles, her feet braced in the corners of the stall. Dieter scrubbed both their bodies with spiced soap—his hands slid down her breasts and between her legs. Kathe realized that the sixteenth century had a lot to discover about sex and cleanliness."

"“Why are they shooting at us?” The older man stared at her. Kurt answered evenly, “That is what every soldier wants to know—I suppose it is because we are shooting at them.”"