“How did you . . . pass the time? Sunday asked. You couldnt just ching out of it, could you?We had a different form of chinging, Eunice said. An earlier type of virtual-reality technology, much more...”

“A city's only ever three hot meals away from anarchy.”

“Consider all the inanimate matter in the universe, all the dumb atoms, all the mindless molecules, all the oblivious dust grains and pebbles and rocks and iceballs and worlds and stars, all the unt...”

“Yves Klein said it was the essence of colour itself: the colour that stood for all other colours. A man once spent his entire life searching for a particular shade of blue that he remembered encoun...”

“Making love was a game of echoes. We had shared memories so many times that when I made love to her, I knew exactly how it felt to be Purslane. I could taste and feel her other lovers and she could...”

“Half of all the great art and literature in existence went unrecognised during the lifetimes of its creators.”

“We never see other people anyway, only the monsters we make of them.”

“But these weren't the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around--they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, ...”

“You guys know about vampires? You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? Theres this idea that monsters dont have reflections in a mirror. And what Ive always thought isnt that monsters d...”