“And just as he said of me, the thing that his heart desired was not the thing that he professed to want.”

“In the middle of all the world's incessant noise, her message was music, and music was a thing that I'd mostly lived my life without. In the ten years since I'd last seen Miranda she'd come to some...”

“In fact, although I am not aware of it (and I am never aware of it, no matter how many times I have the dream) her suicide is a foregone conclusion. It is this way in dreams: when decisions are bei...”

“Be the time he finds his way out of the chamber and the planetarium, he has become me.”

“Like most modern people, we no longer bothered to make the distinction between events in real life and the dramas of fictional worlds, and so the cliff-hanger that inevitably, reliably ended the ho...”

“Think of it. Going to sleep and waking up later in a science fiction future. It'll be fantastic. The shock and the wonder of it.”

“He was, however, unable to give much prolonged or continuous thought to anything that evening , or to concentrate on any one idea; and anyway, even if he had been able to, he would not have found h...”

“Nature can counsel nothing but crime.”

“A criminal remains a criminal whether he uses a convict's suit or a monarch's crown.”

“And just as he said of me, the thing that his heart desired was not the thing that he professed to want.”

“This is the last moment of contentment untainted by sorrow, when the brain hesitates before delivering the message to the heart that it knows it must.”

“In the middle of all the world's incessant noise, her message was music, and music was a thing that I'd mostly lived my life without. In the ten years since I'd last seen Miranda she'd come to some...”

“Tell her I'm sorry I sold the diamond, eh?" Sammy said. "I broke my promise. When she disappeared in Alaska... ah, so long ago, I finally used that diamond, moved to Texas as I always dreamed. I st...”

“Dramatic. A well developed sense of the dramatic has values beyond what people usually imagine. One of these is to realise the limitations of a sense of the dramatic.”

“In the future, churches, mosques, synagogues and temples, all of them will be museums! The intellectual progression of humanity will necessitate such a drastic and dramatic change in the human hist...”