"The next morning, Wil Morgan awoke from a fitful night’s sleep and a rather disturbing variation of his anxiety dream in which he’d arrived too late to register for the World’s Biggest Failure competition and had been disqualified."

"“I think you’re missing the point.” “I think I’m not alone in that.”"

"There was evidence of neither angels nor ambulance workers, which Wil took to be a positive sign."

"Wil felt like a nun at a fashion show: he was clearly out of his comfort zone, and would probably be better off sticking to his usual habits."

"Wil had always suspected Mrs. Chappell’s cats were onto something: if one can act as if everything is right with the world while all around clowns dressed in snorkels, flippers, and tutus are throwing bowls of neon-green custard at each other then, by golly, everything is right with the world."

"He was also willing to bet that not a single part of his next three or four minutes was going to make any sense, yet somehow it would all fit quite neatly into Mrs. Chappell’s version of reality."

"Wil tried a vacant stare, just to see if he could beat the old lady at her own game."

"It was apparent that he was out of his league, and that the only way to compete would be to play along until everyone reverted to ignoring him. At that point, he’d be able to slip out the back door and return to his previously scheduled life."

"Your eyes only see what your mind lets you believe!"

"Life is not about how you use your eyes; it’s about having vision."

"Ignoring the old man, Wil reasoned, was the first step to figuring him out."

"Wil allowed his voice to trail off. The chances of a rational explanation at this point were in exact proportion to the chances of Lucy believing it."

"He stopped in his tracks to consider what might be Actually Occurring, as opposed to Apparently Occurring."

"The cat leaned into Wil’s leg and rubbed a little bit, just to let Wil know that he had officially been given permission to exist."

"Wil Morgan awoke from his regular anxiety dream, in which he had just finished second in a World’s Biggest Failure competition."

"Outside, the city streets were gray and sodden. Indeed, Wil often fancied this was the city where they had invented the color gray."

"He began to think of better days, all of which lay in the opposite direction from the one he was facing."

"String theory has a close relationship to quantum field theory — indeed in some sense it encompasses all interesting quantum field theories."

"as quoted by Maria Shtilmark in:"

"From 1980 through 1984 Michael Green worked with Schwarz to develop superstring theory, and in 1984 they showed that apparent inconsistencies between superstring theory and quantum theory are circumvented in certain special cases. This work kindled the "first superstring revolution," which led to an explosion of interest in this novel approach to quantum gravity and the unification of the forces."

"Woit ... is a blogger – he runs an anti-strings blog, he's an ex-physicist, a PhD I think. ... He has strong views about string theory, which he's entitled to, and he blogs them. And good for him."

"Nationalism does not provide a single way of talking about the world."

"Each flag will have its own particular symbols like the chakra-dhavaja, or wheel, in the Indian flag, or the Protestant orange and Catholic green in the flag of Eire. Even as a flag indicates particularity, with its own particularity, with its own individual patterns (whether the Stars and Stripes, the Union Jack, the Tricolor or whatever), it also flags its own universality. Each flag, by its conventional rectangular pattern, announces itself to be an element of an established, recognizable series, in which all the flags are essentially similar in their conventions of difference. The odd exception, like the pennant-shaped flag of Nepal, only serves to confirm the general rule. New nations, in designing their flags, tend to follow heraldic convention of colour as well as shape: they avoid certain shades like shocking pink and kingfisher blue (Firth, 1973). The hoisting of the newly designed flag indicates that another nation has joined the club of nations: 'we' have become like 'you' (no longer 'them'); 'we' are all nations, with 'our' flags and 'our' anthems, 'our' seats in the United Nations, and 'our' participation, with appropriately designed vests at Olympic Games and World Cups."

"How would you get supergravity out of string theory?"

"For example, each nation is expected to have its own flag and national anthem."

"A national anthem is a universal sign of particularity. The conventions of the oeuvre demand that the uniqueness of the nation be celebrated in a universally stylized manner. National anthems not only fit a common pattern, but it is part of their symbolism that they are seen to do so. They flag the nation as a nation among nations, as flags themselves do."

"I know that within the Tory party the hard Brexiteers are compared to the leaders of the French revolution. I think Gove is Brissot, and Boris Johnson is Danton, and Rees-Mogg is compared to Robespierre. We should not forget that the efforts of these men were not appreciated by the common man they claimed to represent – because they all ended up on the guillotine. So that’s important to remind [them]."

"In 1997 he was selected to contest Central Fife, a gritty former mining region and the last place in the UK to elect a Communist MP. As he went from door to door, it emerged that the elderly lady accompanying him was his nanny. But rumours that he took the Bentley are nothing short of scurrilous. "Of course I took nanny!" he cries. "She’s one of the family – and I needed all the support I could get. But I didn’t drive the Bentley – I couldn’t have afforded the petrol – so it was the Merc.""

"[C]harming and funny, kind, mad and totally himself."

"His manners are perfumed, but his opinions are poison. Rees-Mogg is quite simply an unfailing, unbending, unrelenting reactionary."

"[T]he Honourable Member for the 18th Century."

"I want cheaper food. I want hormone-injected beef from Australia. I've eaten beef in Australia, it's delicious. There's nothing wrong with it."

"If I were American I'd want the border closed, I'd be all in favour of building a wall. I'd want to build a wall in the middle of the English Channel."

"The answer lies in reuniting the Right. What we need is a big, open and comprehensive offer to those in Reform."

"I've done my bit by having six children, so now you do yours."

"[T]he privileges committee is not even a proper legal set up. It has a gossamer of constitutional propriety thrown over it, but it is in fact a political committee against Boris Johnson."

"Parties that try and gerrymander end up finding their clever scheme comes back to bite them – as dare I say we found by insisting on voter ID for elections. We found the people who didn’t have ID were elderly and they by and large voted Conservative, so we made it hard for our own voters and we upset a system that worked perfectly well."

"With the help of Nigel Farage in a Conservative government, as a Conservative minister, with Boris Johnson probably returning as foreign secretary and welcoming the likes of Ben Habib and Richard Tice into our party, as well as pursuing genuinely conservative policies, winning the next election suddenly becomes within reach."

"I thought Uxbridge was a fundamentally important result for us. It shows that if you are on the side of voters and doing things to make their lives better, rather than worse, then lo and behold people will actually vote for you. Let other countries catch up and let us catch their breath. Let us move away from an ideological view of net zero and work with the environment in a way that is affordable."

"I think you're being very rude to marsupials ... I think it makes kangaroo courts look respectable [On The World at One (BBC Radio 4)]"

"Boris is doing very well against the marsupials. [Tweet during the hearing]"

"Recall that Rees-Mogg likes to pose as a custodian of our unwritten constitution. In fact, he is a vandal in pinstripes, ready to undermine public trust in the very parliamentary democracy he pretends to cherish."

"The key is that we have our fish back: they are now British fish, and they are better and happier fish for it."

"And instead of this endless carping, saying it's difficult to get them, we should actually celebrate this phenomenal success of the British nation in getting up to a quarter of a million tests of a disease that nobody knew about until earlier in the year."

"I think it is a real scandal that UNICEF should be playing politics in this way when it is meant to be looking after people in the poorest, the most deprived, countries of the world where people are starving, where there are famines and where there are civil wars. And they make cheap political points of this kind, giving, I think, £25,000 to one council. It is a political stunt of the lowest order."

"I want us to leave the European Union"

"I have always thought that no deal is better than Mrs May's deal, but Mrs May's deal is better than not leaving at all."

"It is a grave error to try and use legal process to settle political questions,"

"My suspicion is that any delay to Brexit is a plot to stop Brexit. This would be the most grievous error that politicians could commit."

"Everybody wants a deal; the prime minister wants a deal, the EU wants a deal and the Irish wants a deal,"