"Because, really, what else is there? Life is years of sheer, endless boredom punctuated by bouts of the mildly interesting. Not much to do, not much to believe in. Just eat, sleep, shit, breathe, breed, grow old and die."

"There is no devil mocking you. God didn’t give you cancer to punish you. Colon cancer has come to you through a combination of losing the genetic lottery, cosmic rays, and perhaps too much bacon in your younger days."

"But if you really want to feel the stress of divine regard, spend time in an oncology unit. The half-hidden whispers and the strained smiles and the whirring click of the infusion pumps form a choir of pain every bit as agonized as the howls of the damned in some imagined hell."

"People say there are no atheists in the foxholes, but people are idiots. It’s awfully tough to believe in God when you’re knee deep in mud, blood, and other men’s guts. Combat is the Problem of Evil on the hoof."

"Like all worthwhile art, the piece invites us on a journey that has no path nor map, nor even an endpoint. Only a process, footsteps through the mind of an artist now forever lost to us."

"Magic, the blessed curse that gnaws at the soul and leaves a void in the mind into which too much that is alien and deadly can settle."

"With age came wisdom. Sometimes wisdom came with an ass kicking, too. And nothing could kick ass like the whole world."

"These are the hard truths: Some words were never meant to be read. Some thoughts cannot be undone. Some darknesses shall never be dispelled. Some people will never believe these truths."

"All men are born to die…Once a fool pretends otherwise."

"Nothing ever built could truly match the pattern-recognition and free associative skills of human (or post-human) wetware collectively known as “hunches.” Strong AIs could approximate that uniquely biological skill through a combination of brute force and deeply clever circuit design, but even then, the spark of inspiration did not flow so well."

"I know he is important Meat because he is dressed like a fool and doing no work."

"Springfield McKenna didn’t place much faith in rumors. She’d traded in them far too long to lend credence to someone else’s social munitions."

"Sarita placed little faith in such rumors. The fears of small people everywhere could speak louder than any voice, and with less reason. Legends were just that: legendary."

"In the end, words are all that survive us."

"He’d volunteered for the Howard Institute program because of the most basic human motivation—tourism. Seeing what was over the next hill had trumped even sex as the driving force in human evolution."

"He was never a churchgoing man, McAllen, but anyone who’s stood when the bullets fly or watched over the herds when the wolf packs are hunting down the moon knows better than to disbelieve. Life is too short and hard and strange not to blame God for what He done made of the world."

"Art unexamined is, after all, art unexperienced."

"Horn could hear the click of the dice that made up the multiverse. Beneath the struggles of gods and men and monsters, behind the powers of magic and prayer and bared blade, chance governed all."

"Why was he thinking of her now? Fool, fool, fool. The barmaid had cast the oldest spell of all on him, a cantrip requiring only alcohol, sorrow, and time."

"“Some things change a man slowly. Journeys. The passage of years. The love of a good woman. Imprisonment.” The monk paused a moment. Horn sensed he was speaking from experience, looking back at his own paths. Then: “Some things change a man swiftly. War. Disease. Shipwrecks. The love of a bad woman.”"

"All revelation is a lie. It must be. The divine is an incommunicable disease, too large and splintered to fit within the confines of a primate brain. Our minds evolved to compete for fruit and pick carrion, not to comb through the parasites that drop from the clouds of God’s dreaming. But just as an equation asymptotically approaches the solution, so revelation can asymptomatically approach the truth about the underlying nature of the universe. The lie narrows to the width of the whisker of a quantum cat, while the truth, poking slowly along behind, finally merges Siamese-twinned to its precursor."

"With age comes wisdom. Or at least experience."

"Unwise or unlucky wizards learned fast enough how much one paid for one’s mistakes. One sometimes paid more dearly for one’s successes."

"The problem with basing your entire economy and raison d’être on a constrained resource was that eventually you ran out of the resource in question. Decisions which had seemed canny two centuries ago during the bright days of the port’s founding and initial construction were now foolhardy in the blindingly obvious light of hindsight."

"“No,” Horn replied. “I am a seeker of wisdom.” The old man squinted, taking in Horn’s scars, motley head of fire-scarred hair, and ropy muscles. “Looks like you haven’t found it yet, or you’d have learned to stay out of trouble.”"

"There is no certainty but that there is no certainty."

"People did sometimes leave town, though. Because no one knew where they went didn’t necessarily mean they’d been abducted, killed, and drained by a vampire."

"I had, at the time, an irrational, Luddite inclination that there was something morally bankrupt about making art with a computer."

"“There is only one term for this war,” said the old man with the sunglasses. “‘Clusterfuck.’ Cluster as in ‘cluster’ and fuck as in ‘fuck.’ No more need be said.”"

"After my mother finally quit drinking, she entered a brief epoch of peace in her life. Gone were the paranoia, the accusations, the belittlements, the bitter rage of judgment, the look of fear. For years, nearly every day a lost weekend, she had been possessed by the dark amber ghast of gag-sweet Taylor Cream Sherry. Living with her back then had been like living with a vampire whose bite drained but never conferred immortality."

"The semester began, and I soon discovered that abstract painting was still the order of the day at the university. Most of the professors had come of age in their own work during the late fifties and sixties and were still channeling the depleted spirit of Jackson Pollock; second- and third-rate abstract expressionists tutoring young painters in the importance of ignoring the figure. The canvases were vast, the paint apply liberally, and the bigger the mess the more praise the piece garnered."

"Nothing is more comforting to people than to have their certainties trumpeted back to them in bold, clear typeface."

"Now I was stuck and could feel the tide of years suddenly beginning to rise around me."

"The wind and sun, the salt water, the hard work aged a body rapidly, and when I would look at the old man who clammed, I was too young to sense the wisdom their years on the water had bestowed upon them and saw only what I did not want to become."

"An honor it was, too, as he told me, “You know that because you don’t get paid anything for it.”"

"The lion is fur, muscle, tendon, claw, and speed, five important ingredients of the unfathomable."

"My choice of dog was the quarter pounder. That’s right, the Hindenburg of Wawa processed meat products. Two of those and you were doing a half pound of sodium nitrates (is that the stuff they use for explosives?) and animal by-products with a little food coloring added. This stuff can’t be good for you. Even while I was biting into these things, I was picturing a third eye growing in my asshole. It was Russian roulette and I was putting the barrel to my head at least twice a day. I’d become addicted to hot dogs while on the rebound from cigarettes."

"She had her sights set on being an English major. Owen admired the quixotic nature of her plan, its blatant impracticality, its vow of poverty."

"Real memories intrude now and then as do self-admonitions for a wasted life, but the smoke’s other feature is that it lets you not give a shit about anything but taking in more smoke."

"My hero was J. S. Bach. It was from his works that I came to understand mathematics and, through a greater understanding of math, came to a greater understanding of Bach—the golden ratio, the rise of complexity through the reiteration of simple elements, the presence of the cosmic in the common."

"He’s no physician, he’s Grandfather Mess. He couldn’t cure a pain in the ass unless he left the room."

"“My dear Philosopher,” said the countess. “You give sanity a bad name.”"

"What good is the illusion of fiction if it cannot show us a way to become the people we need to be?"

"In their exquisite self-centeredness our ancestors believed that they were alone in the universe. At the same time, they had convinced themselves that Earth was the blue apple of God’s eye and the sole reason for all of creation. This two-headed fallacy caused humanity both delusions of grandeur and a paranoiac sense of loneliness."

"“Can you think of anything, my dear Mr. Fell, more intricately complex, more perfectly compact and thoroughly functional than the human eye?” “No, sir,” said August. “I thought not,” said Larchcroft. “Consider this, though. Our eyes were created by light. Without the existence of light, we would not have eyes. Over the long course of man’s evolutionarily maturation to his modern condition, light sculpted these magical orbs, making subtle adjustments through the centuries, until now they are capable of the incredible process of sight. This most vital sense, not only a means of self-preservation but the single most important catalyst for culture, is a product of the inherent genius of light.”"

"Halloween was close, our favorite holiday because it carried none of the pain-in-the-ass holiness of Christmas and still there was free candy."

"“You gotta watch that anger. The customer’s always right,” said Merk. “The customer’s hardly ever right,” said Slackwell."

"If he’s not crazy, he’s probably playing with your mind. He seems to have a healthy measure of mischief about him. That string tie is a good indicator."

"Parents—so essential yet sometimes like something you have stepped in and cannot get off your shoe. What else is there but to love them?"