“It was almost noon when the plane touched down at the Triad airport on the outskirts of Greensboro. There was a hire car waiting for me; I waved my notepad at the dashboard to transmit my profile, ...”

“They floated for a while, two flesher-shaped creatures and a giant worm in a cloud of spinning metal fragments, an absurd collection of imaginary debris, glinting by the light of the true stars.”

“There was no truth in anything he said, anything he believed. It was all just an expression of his own needs.”

“Fleshers used to spin fantasies about aliens arriving to conquer Earth, to steal their precious physical resources, to wipe them out for fear of competitionas if a species capable of making the jou...”

“A recent survey of 2,000 male graduates of Harvard Business Schoolfound that penis length & IQ were equally good predictors of annualincome. -- from "Eugene”

“And after the briefest flowering of understanding, my own generation had grown complacent. At some level, we must have started taking it for granted that the way the universe worked was now obvious...”

“[She] had heard it said that there was only one emotion which, in recollection, was capable of resurrecting the full immediacy and power of the originalone emotion that time could never fade, and t...”

“In my view, suicide is not really a wish for life to end.'What is it then?'It is the only way a powerless person can find to make everybody else look away from his shame. The wish is not to die, bu...”

“I know how soon youth would fade and bloom perish, if, in the cup of bliss offered, but one dreg of shame, or one flavour of remorse were detected; and I do not want sacrifice, sorrow, dissolution ...”