Of course, if you assume a big enough conspiracy, you can explain anything, including the cosmos itself.

What do you care? You always liked loneliness better than you liked people. No offence liking yourself's the beginning of all love.

There was an omnipresent sense of crisis.

Devils may be nothing but beings intent on their purpose, which now happens to collide with yours.

Not for the first time Richard reflected that this age's vaunted 'communications industry' had chiefly provided people and nations with the means of frightening to death and simultaneously boring to extinction themselves and each other.

Ningauble shrugged. You're a hero. You should know.

What was life worth, anyway, if you had to sit around remembering not to mention this, that, and the other thing because someone else might be upset?