"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"Wil had always been a hopeless romantic, with “hopeless” being the operative word."

"Hindsight would later suggest to Wil that things coincidentally began to fall down at exactly the same time he began to relax. He wasn’t to know this at the time, of course. Otherwise it would’ve been foresight."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"Wil knew that he had done something that might never be undone: his Dad might forgive the years of lies, but he would never forgive this one moment of absolute truth."

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

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

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

"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."

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

"John Mortimer: Now that nuclear weapons exist, you have to face the fact that you would rather be conquered by, say, the Russians than have the world blown up? Thompson: Yes, I think so. Don't you? Mortimer: Better red than dead? Thompson: Yes. Mortimer: So, if nuclear weapons had existed in 1939, we would have had to accept conquest by Hitler to save a nuclear war? Thompson: Yes."

"But even a man who has paid his rent doesn’t have forever."

"[I]n the early eighties, I was turned aside once again, by the emergency of the “second cold war” and by the heavy demands of the peace movement. I do not regret this: I am convinced that the peace movement made a major contribution to dispersing the cold war, which had descended like a polluting cloud on every field of political and social life."

"It was both true, and not the complete truth, like so much of his talk."

"The man who has done more than anyone else to rouse the national conscience over nuclear weapons is E. P. Thompson... Like Gladstone, who felt himself called away from writing about the Christine doctrine of eternal punishment to lead the agitation over the Bulgarian atrocities, Thompson abandoned his scholar's desk and the book that he is writing on William Blake last autumn to devote himself to the anti-nuclear cause."

"The distinctive contribution of working people to the agitation for Reform between 1789 and 1832 is brilliantly invoked in E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class."

"“Don’t be like that, mate. After all, it all turned out okay in the end, right?” If by okay, he meant a dead fiancée, a child that wasn’t his and his soul mate lost forever on the other side of the world, then yeah, he was great, Nick thought bitterly."

"She’d been happier with him than she had ever thought imaginable, but only now she understood it wasn’t because their DNA had dictated it, but because she’d opened herself up to the concept of love."

"Since being part of a couple he’d learned relationships didn’t need truth to make them work, they just needed one of them to possess a heart large enough to beat for both of them."

"“I am worth more than this, Mark,” she snapped. “And if that doesn’t sink into your head pretty bloody soon, it’s going to be too late.”"

"He put the phone away and pondered what his Match might look like, before deciding it was inappropriate to be thinking about a second woman while he was still in the company of the first."

"It seemed incredible to him that people were stupid enough to store their entire life on five inches of plastic for anyone to poke about in."

"One day I was thinking about a conversation I’d had with my sister Maggie about why she married her husband, John. She was adamant it was love at first sight, and even though they were only fourteen when they met, they knew they’d end up spending the rest of their lives together. I’m a scientist, so naturally I’m skeptical about that kind of thing, but it did get me thinking—what if she was right? What if love at first sight actually exists?"

"The decor of her office was as sparse as her home, she realized. It said nothing about her. But when you didn’t care enough about your own decisions it was far more convenient to pay interior designers to make them for you."

"“Like John Lennon said, ‘All You Need Is Love.’” “Yes, but he also said, ‘I Am The Walrus,’ so let’s not hold too much credence to his pearls of wisdom.”"

"Ellie knew how easy it was for someone with money to smother someone without it."

"Enough bullets had hit Ellie over the years to know when a writer was about to take aim."

"Don’t worry. The only skeletons in my closet belong to the mice."

"They say you can’t miss what you’ve never had, but that’s not true."

"He was an addiction she didn’t want to be free of. And the more she had of him, the more she craved."

"We Jews, we, the destroyers, will remain the destroyers for ever. Nothing that you do will meet our needs and demands. We will destroy because we need a world of our own, a God-world, which it is not in your nature to build. Beyond all temporary alliances with this or that action lies the ultimate split in nature and destiny, the enmity between the Game and God."

"The thinking man needs no scientist to teach him the wonder of creation: he needs neither a telescope nor a microscope in order to see God; nor do formulae teach him the nature of God. Life itself, being, the staggering wonder of mere existence, fills completely, crams beyond all possibility of addition, the faculty of astonishment and bewilderment in the sensitive man. Those to whom existence has become commonplace by familiarity—or who have never been smitten prostrate by the riddle of existence—need a crescendo succession of "shockers" to touch their brutish minds. They didn't know the marvel of the universe until they learned of electricity; but now that electricity is as commonplace as sunlight, they need a theory of relativity; and when that is played out as an advertising stunt for the ingenuity of the Almighty, they will need something else."

"The fool that saith in his heart there is no God is the city fool to whom nothing is wonderful any more: and those who do not know wonder do not know God."

"In everything we are destroyers—even in the instruments of destruction to which we turn for relief. The very socialism and internationalism through which our choked spirit seeks utterance, which seem to threaten your way of life, are alien to our spirit's demands and needs. Your socialists and internationalists are not serious. The charm of these movements, the attraction, such as it is, which they exercise, is only in their struggle: it is the fight which draws your gentile radicals."

"Get your boys ready. However this turns out, there'll be trouble—and they'll need more than tear gas and pepperballs to deal with it." "I see," Assad said, unhappy. A nod to the ASPS, and the soldiers opened more cases, taking out compact FN P90 submachine guns. "Another contingency," he told Nina and Macy. "I really hope we don't have to use them, Mr. Chase."

"I don't hold animals superior or even equal to humans. The whole case for behaving decently to animals rests on the fact that we are the superior species. We are the species uniquely capable of imagination, rationality and moral choice—and that is precisely why we are under the obligation to recognise and respect the rights of animals."

"Whenever people say "we mustn't be sentimental" you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add, "we must be realistic," they mean they are going to make money out of it."