As if the dead really do persist, even in a bottle of wine.

Teamwork," Koteks snarled, "is one word for it, yeah. What it really is is a way to avoid responsibility. It's a symptom of the gutlessness of the whole society.

Questions arose. Like, what in the fuck was going on here, basically.

Some of us are afraid of dying; others of human loneliness. Profane was afraid of land or seascapes like this, where nothing else lived but himself.

Death has come in the pantry door: stands watching them, iron and patient, with a look that says 'try to tickle me.

In their brief time together Slothrop forms the impression that this octopus is not in good mental health, though where's his basis for comparing?

[Oedipa Maas] awoke at last to find herself getting laid.

All variables are independent.

And when Franz Ferdinand pays, everybody pays!

What sort of an age is this where a man becomes one's enemy only when his back is turned?

But as with Maxwell's Demon, so now. Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist.

Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.

She drove like one of the damned on holiday.

What was “walking on water,” if it wasn’t Bible talk for surfing?

They plot, they plot, sleeping or afoot they never let up.

Some would say eccentric. I would say stoned out of his fuckin mind, nothing personal.

A woman is only half of something there are usually two sides to.

Culture attracts the worst impulses of the moneyed, it has no honor, it begs to be suburbanized and corrupted.

You can only cruise the boulevards of regret so far, and then you've got to get back up onto the freeway again.

Down the toilet, lookit me, What a silly thing ta do! Hope nobody takes a pee, Yippy dippy dippy doo . . .

She moved through it carrying her fat book, attracted, unsure, a stranger, wanting to feel relevant but knowing how much of a search among alternative universes it would take.

Stencil had called from a Hungarian coffee shop on York Avenue known as Hungarian Coffee Shop

My mother is the war,' declares Roger Mexico, leaning over to open the door.

Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate.

These times are unfriendly toward Worlds alternative to this one

If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic,what else?

...a million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death and some of them even know it...

The hole left by the moon’s tearing-free and monument to her exile;

Chotto, Kenichiro! Dozo, motto panukeiku.

The act of metaphor then was a thrust at truth and a lie, depending where you were: inside, safe, or outside, lost.

Is it just this miserable fucking city, too many faces, making us crazy? Are we seeing some wholesale return of the dead?” “You’d prefer retail?

The grandeur of space, dig it. Zillions of stars, each one gets its own pixel.” “Awesome.” “Maybe, but it’s code’s all it is.

You wait. Everyone has an Antarctic.

Time is never wasted if you remember to bring along something to read.

For me, Shambhala, you see, turned out to be not a goal but an absence. Not the discovery of a place but the act of leaving the futureless place where I was. And in the process I arrived at Constantinople.

...Our beauty lies in this extended capacity for convolution.

And men of science,' cries dixon, 'may be but the simple tools of others, with no more idea of what they are about, than a hammer knows of a house.

What is most appealing about young folks, after all, is the changes, not the still photograph of finished character but the movie, the soul in flux.

Damn you all. You have no idea what you're heading into. This world you take to be 'the' world will die, and descend into Hell, and all history after that will belong properly to the history of Hell.

Idle dreaming is often of the essence of what we do

I still don't even know for sure what a tendril is.

True pornography is given us by vastly patient professionals.

1904 was the year the American Food and Drug people took the cocaine out of Coca-Cola, which gave us an alcoholic and death oriented generation of Yanks ideally equipped to fight WW II.

Japanese staff who claim not to know a word of English beyond “awesome” and “sucks”, which for a vast range of human endeavour, actually, is more than enough…

[...] times of great idealism carry equal chances for great corruptibility.

Mason glowers, shaking his head. "I've ascended, descended, even condescended, and the List's not ended,— but haven't yet trans-cended a blessed thing, thankee.

Lovely morning, World War Two.

To those of us who survived [...], it also means that we have learned to stand outside our history and watch it, without feeling too much. A little schizoid.

Perhaps the only reason they survived, Stencil reasoned, was that they were not alone. God knew how many more there were with a hothouse sense of time, no knowledge of life, and at the mercy of Fortune.