You shouldn't be looking for the secret to making people follow fads, you should be looking for the secret to making them think for themselves. Because that's what science is all about.

People will buy anything at jumble sales,' I said. 'At the Evacuated Children Charity Fair a woman bought a tree branch that had fallen on the table.

Everyone else had the look of tired patience people always got when listening to a sermon, no matter what the century.

Fred Astaire is my hero. I love him because he was willing to kill himself to make his art look effortless. And because he proved it's possible to be an artist and a good person.

And every place and time an author writes about is imaginary, from Oz to Raymond Chandler's L.A. to Dickens's London.

The amazing thing is that chaotic systems don't always stay chaotic," Ben said, leaning on the gate. "Sometimes they spontaneously reorganize themselves into an orderly structure." "They suddenly become less chaotic?" I said, wishing that would happen at HiTek. "No, that's the thing. They become more and more chaotic until they reach some sort of chaotic critical mass. When that happens, they spontaneously reorganize themselves at a higher equilibrium level. It's called self-organized criticality.

He looked resigned, as though he knew that wretched door--to where? Home? Heaven? Peace?--would never open, and at the same time he seemed resolved, ready to do his bit even though he couldn't possibly know what sacrifices that would require. Had he been kept here, too--in a place he didn't belong, serving in a war in which he hadn't enlisted, to rescue sparrows and soldiers and shopgirls and Shakespeare? To tip the balance?