"He flips a thruppence my way. I catch it. “Why thank you, sir. I find I have grown most fond of money.” “Odd. That seems a common condition among those who do not have it.”"

"Ultimately, you are his physician, which is probably why he is about to die."

"“Have you been drinking?” I say. “Why does everyone ask me that when I am in a good mood?”"

"Like so many regulations the Anatomy Act was created to solve one problem and caused another."

"She isn’t old and cranky. She’s just cranky."

"After all, women feign interest in men all the time to better their positions."

"I no longer wonder at Victorian mortality rates. Now I just marvel that anyone survived at all."

"I’d never say I don’t want him coming to my rescue if I need it. I’m a feminist, not an idiot."

"There’s cruel, and then there’s downright evil."

"I’ve learned pogroms do not require much in the way of organization. Merely ample hate."

"Please understand, Schisms occur within subcommunities frequently and with relative ease. Mergings of subcommunities, on the other hand, are more like comet sightings… very rare indeed."

"“That’s…that’s a nightmarish scenario. Do you really think people would just… attack one another, as soon as the fences were gone? That they’d throw aside civil society so easily?” “What ‘civil society,” Leah? Your eight million inhabitants have never learned how to exist and thrive in a civil society—all they’ve known are clans, sheltered clans.”"

"William Shakespeare has one of his characters propose, Let’s kill all the lawyers. He forgot to include the bureaucrats."

"Bureaucracies are dullards’ tools of revenge on men of action. Sputtering machines filled with blinkered human cogs, they respond glacially to signals issued by their political masters, rather like ponderous dinosaurs whose tiny brains required an auxiliary neural center within the hip region to re-transmit commands all the way to their tail."

"People will believe what they want most to believe, what they yearn to be true. Nothing is more readily accepted than the seeming confirmation of an already established prejudice."

"Thanks to my work, I know the type all too well. A malcontent, a refusenik. A grievance monger, quick as a scampering lemur to take offense. Such people make little sense to me."

"Instead of gathering the lost Sparks of holiness and restoring the unity of mankind and the world, the whole point of our existence has become an ever more rigid purification, a sifting out of dissenting views, the banishment of anything which threatens to challenge our customs and ingrained ways of thinking, or which makes us uncomfortable or uncertain—"

"Psychologists claim the mind is incapable of imagining itself not existing, of mentally inhabiting its own extinction. Yet I can sense obliteration’s lackeys nibbling away at my edges, hungry mice eating the brown crusts of the bread of my being."

"Would it be riding the wave, or stepping over a puddle?"

"And so he nattered on, like an old woman fretting over the fraying of her prayer rug, not realizing the ceaseless nervous fidgeting of her fingers was the cause of its fraying."

"“The wall will always be there to protect us,” they said. I later came to understand that it is merely a tangible, universally visible symbol of the far more important invisible walls separating the seventy-thousand subcommunities—or is it eighty-thousand now? One day, I firmly believe, there will be as many subcommunities as there are residents in the City."

"“I hope all your mixtures are not as expensive,” said Alan apprehensively. “Oh, dear, no,” said the old man. “It would be no good charging you that sort of price for a love potion, for example. Young people who need a love potion very seldom have five thousand dollars. Otherwise they would not need a love potion.”"

"It is a sad reflection on life that when there is only one thing to do it is always extremely unpleasant."

"Now, producers are known to be God-like creatures, and the chief point of resemblance is that they must either create new stars or have no public."

"“You lovers,” said his companion, “are surprised by nothing, except first that your mistress should fancy you, and next, that they should fancy someone else.”"

"“Humphrey, dear,” she said, “we hear you’ve become famous. Is it true?” “It's true if you've heard it,” he replied. “That's what fame is.”"

"There is no bore like a despairing lover."

"I reflected that where vanity of that sort is to be found on one side of a contract there is always hope on the other."

"“That does not take you to Hell,” said Louis, “but only to Barons Court. The mistake is pardonable.”"

"He knew that I was impressed, but I knew that he wished to impress me. This made us even, except of course that he still had the money."

"“Selfishness and greed,” said he, “have made the world what it is today.”"

"Take a friendly word of advice. You don't want to make pictures. It’s nothing but worry. Besides, you'll get mixed up with a lot of actors."

"Alice and Irwin were as simple and as happy as any young couple in a family-style motion picture. In fact, they were even happier, for people were not looking at them all the time and their joys were not restricted by the censorship code."

"Franklin Fletcher dreamed of luxury in the form of tiger-skins and beautiful women. He was prepared, at a pinch, to forgo the tiger-skins. Unfortunately the beautiful women seemed equally rare and inaccessible."

"She was complete in every particular, and all of the highest quality; she was a picture gallery, an anthology of the poets, a precipitation of all that has ever been dreamed of love: her goodly eyes like Saphyres shining bright, her forehead yvory white, her cheeks lyke apples which the sun hath rudded, her lips lyke cherryes charming men to bite, her brest lyke to a bowle of creame uncrudded, her paps lyke a lyllies budded, her snowie neck lyke to a marble towre; and all her body like a pallace fayre, ascending up, with many a stately stayre, to honours seat and chastities sweet bowre."

"“To listen,” said little Guis, “is to be drunk without spending a penny. You think you understand; you seem to fly through the air; you have to burst out laughing.”"

"“Pray, sir,” said she, “tell me only, where am I?” “Why, in Hell, to be sure,” said he, with a hearty laugh. “Oh, thank goodness!” cried she. “I thought I was in Buenos Aires.”"

"Nobody since Poe has so loved a well-rotted corpse."

"Smith filled my mind with incredible worlds, impossibly beautiful cities, and still more fantastic creatures."

"All human thought, all science, all religion, is the holding of a candle to the night of the universe."

"To destroy wonder and mystery, is to destroy the only elements that make existence tolerable."

"In sheer daemonic strangeness and fertility of conception, Clark Ashton Smith is perhaps unexcelled."

"For thin is the veil betwixt man and the godless deep. The skies are haunted by that which it were madness to know; and strange abominations pass evermore between earth and moon and athwart the galaxies. Unnameable things have come to us in alien horror and will come again. And the evil of the stars is not as the evil of earth."

"Not as the plants and flowers of Earth, growing peacefully beneath a simple sun, were the blossoms of the planet Lophai. Coiling and uncoiling in double dawns; tossing tumultuously under vast suns of jade green and balas-ruby orange; swaying and weltering in rich twilights, in aurora-curtained nights, they resembled fields of rooted serpents that dance eternally to an other-worldly music."

"Lunatics with a speculative bent can sometimes stumble overly close to certain guarded cosmic secrets."

"But here, in this place of eternal bareness and solitude, it seemed that life could never have been. The stark, eroded stones were things that might have been reared by the toil of the dead, to house the monstrous ghouls and demons of primal desolation."

"Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams; I crown me with the million-colored sun Of secret worlds incredible, and take Their trailing skies for vestment when I soar, Throned on the mounting zenith, and illume The spaceward-flown horizons infinite."

"Stern and white as a tomb, older than the memory of the dead, and built by men or devils beyond the recording of myth, is the mansion in which we dwell."

"Joe Raiola: [T]here was one story that really best typified my relationship with Bill. Like I said, we disagreed on everything. I'm skinny, he's fat. He's hairy and I'm bald. And I'm a healthy guy. I'm into nutrition and vitamins and vegetables and bean sprouts. And Bill would eat anything that moved. I mean this is a guy who ordered steak by mail and got cases of frozen beef in his apartment. So one day Bill calls me into his office. He says, "I want you to go downstairs to the corner of 53rd Street and Madison. It's gotta be 53rd and Madison. It's gotta be the southwest corner. There's a hotdog vendor on that corner. I want you to get me two hotdogs with mustard, sauerkraut." I said, "Bill, I can't do that." I said, "Bill, not only can't I do it, but you don't want me to do it." He said, "Why don't I want you to it? I'm hungry." I said, "Because you know I'm a vegetarian. You know it would be against everything I stand for. It would be against my principles. I am a man of integrity, Bill, like you are. To go down and buy you hotdogs and bring them to you... you would have no respect for me. So you don't want me to buy you these hotdogs." And Bill said, "Wrong!" He said, "Not only do I want you to buy me these hotdogs, but Joe, you are the only person in the office I could trust to bring the hotdogs back without eating them.""