No book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.

I think all the simple things can and do still work - holding your child's hand while walking across the street will do it. But we can hardly hear it for all the noise which has turned love into a cliche, and most people can't even hear John Lennon's "All You Need Is Love" anymore without wincing.

Sometimes ... dreams are all that separate us from the machines.

Books ... were merely nodes in a near-infinite matrix of information that exists in four dimensions, evolving toward the idea of the concept of the approximation of the shadow of Truth vertically through time as well as longitudinally through knowledge.

Fate and victory shift ... now this way, now that way -- like a line of unarmored men under a hail of enemy arrows.

As for the depiction of the Catholic church, it's not meant to be a prediction

What, after all, is more real to us than the geography of our childhoods?