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.

A scientist ought to have a healthy disregard for coincidences.

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

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

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

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

The result is ... that there's no room left in the world for the weird – though plenty for crude, contemptuous, wisecracking, fun-poking imitations of it.