"“‘Truth is cheap, but information costs.’ I can’t remember who said that.” “Vince What’s-His-Name,” said Sam. “Died in a terrorist raid or something. I thought you said all information should be free.” “It should. It isn’t. Knowledge is power. But power corrupts. Which means the Age of Fast Information is an extremely corrupt age in which to live.” “Aren’t they all?” Sam asked him."

"Keep your best whiskey in a bottle marked ‘mouthwash.’"

"If you’re really going to die on me, you could at least rub my neck before you go."

"It was a lonely thing. There was no way to be sure if it meant the same thing to both of you. He’d forgotten that part of making love, how you couldn’t assume that intent was as joined as bodies were."

"Old responses live long, die hard, and frequently leave a troublesome corpse."

"Help him by helping him resist your help."

"Maybe it’s better to be half of something wonderful than a whole nothing at all."

"Fusion power we licked; static cling has us on the ropes. It’s a funny world."

"Some people gain freedom by trading one form of bondage for another."

"“Truth and information are not the same thing. I promise you that’s a fact.” “So you told yourself. But you have to admit that they do coincide often enough to let us all get around in the world safely.”"

"It gets tricky here, but it’s always seemed to be that sanity is, or can be, as relative as anything else. Sacrifice an animal to Zeus and predict the future from the formation of its entrails—do that as a general in ancient Greece hoping for victory in a coming battle and you’re prudent. Do it today and you’re a clinical paranoid and a mean one, too. Sanity, like customs and manners, seems to have a strong basis in the accepted standards of a particular time and place."

"I remembered the sign in front of the cathedral:"

"Everything seemed to happen when you were looking the other way."

"I said, What are you, a federal employee or just a freelance zombie?"

"If a dataline is running and there’s no one there to watch it, has anything really happened?"

"“Is that the way you feel about it?” I asked. “I’m a lawyer. I deal with the law as it is, not how I feel about it.”"

"If fasting really had anything to do with enlightenment then millions of people throughout the ages had died of the secret of life. And the secret of life was, in its entirety, that starvation hurt like a bastard."

"Meditation was such a loose term; you can do almost anything mentally and call it meditation."

"And that vulgar gold lamé upholstery giving me a rash. You can dispute taste but you can’t stop it."

"Technology disgusts me. My senses tell me what I need to know. The rest is noise."

"I pushed her back hard. “You don’t belong with them; you’re not special, you have no place in any unseen world; you’re like me and the rest of our family. Get used to it!” She looked at me like I’d slapped her. “Oh, sorry,” I said, feeling equally stung by her reaction. “It’s hell being ordinary, but that’s the human condition.”"

"There were those who insisted this had already happened, but they could never come up with any solid examples, only vague stories involving the cousin of a daughter of a friend-of-a-friend who overheard someone on an all-night bus telling someone else about it."

"Truth and information are not the same thing!"

"That was the real price, I thought. Once you had power, you ended up having to depend on it. Eventually, like anything else, it owned you. Eventually? No, from the beginning; we just don’t bother admitting it at first."

"The only place to go now is into the context. If you can find it. Between the context and the content, between the mainline and the hardline, falls the shadow."

"If you need someone to believe something, make them go for a walk with you. Walking takes up most of the energy they’d use to disbelieve you."

"Mindplayers didn't really address a lot about the criminal element of this particular world. Everybody in the Mindplayers world couldn't possibly live like the few people that you saw. A lot of times, a culture almost seems to float on top of its own black market, and things from that filter up through the culture. I get the feeling that this law-abiding peaceful thing that I live in now is almost never-never land - to a certain extent it's not even really real. I spent a decade working for Hallmark cards, which is supposed to epitomise sweetness and light and good living and ethics and morals. But Hallmark, like many American manufacturers, has a lot of things like toys and ornaments manufactured in the Far East, by people in sweat-shops. These are children, old people, poor people, people who don't have enough to eat; we get these things so cheaply because we simply use these people and throw them away. This is what I mean about our culture, our never-never land, floating on top of our underworld."

"Everybody wants to be somebody but nobody wants to be just anybody."

"He had the sudden urge to put his arms around her, but the look on her face said that if he made a move toward her, she would move away, and maybe she would keep moving away from him until the distance between them was too great to cross again in one lifetime."

"That was it, then, civilization was officially collapsed if the cops had stopped ticketing abandoned cars and roosted on them instead."

"Fez gave her a squeeze. “You’re a genius, Sam-I-Am.” She squirmed away from him uncomfortably. “It just makes sense, is all.” “Sometimes that’s all it takes to be a genius.”"

"Reaching in, he wrapped the exposed wires around his fingers and ripped them out. The locks released, letting the door fall open a crack. “That’s what we call a Luddite hack.”"

"Ninety percent of life was being there, and the rest was being there on time."

"If you can’t fuck it, and it doesn’t dance, eat it or throw it away."

"When you begin a journey of revenge, start by digging two graves: one for your enemy, and one for yourself."

"Laura Stone knew exactly how to go to hell. She could map out its geography on napkins at departmental cocktail parties; she was able to recite all the passageways and rivers and folds by heart; she was on a first-name basis with its sinners."

"“My daughter won’t go to school this year until eleven o’clock, because she can’t handle being there when third period starts,” the woman said. “Everything scares her. This has ruined her whole life; why should Peter Houghton’s punishment be any less?”"

"I was terrified of that ghost just like they were, but I never let anyone know it. That way, I knew they might call me a lot of awful names ... but one of them wasn't coward."

"Did everyone in jail think they were innocent? All this time Peter had spent lying on the bench, convincing himself that he was nothing like anyone else in the Grafton County Jail—and as it turned out, that was a lie."

"Power isn't doing something terrible to someone who's weaker than you, … It's having the strength to do something terrible, and choosing not to."

"Logan Rourke wasn’t her father, not any more than the guy who’d taken their coins at the toll booth or any other stranger. You could share DNA with someone and still have nothing in common with them"

"How could you change a boy’s bedding every week and feed him breakfast and drive him to the orthodontist and not know him at all?"

"For a moment Laura hesitated outside the door, wondering how she could have been naïve enough to believe this horrible thing had happened to Trixie, when in truth it had happened to all three of them."

"Newborns reminded her of tiny Buddhas, faces full of divinity […] That holiness, somehow, disappeared, and Lacy was always left wondering where in this world it might go."

"Either Josie was someone she didn’t want to be, or she was someone who nobody wanted."

"The enemy was always supposed to be an outsider, not the kid who was sitting right next to you."

"Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them."

"If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone?"

"If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn't be filled?"