I do believe very much in the idea of unexpected or "convulsive" beauty - beauty in the service of liberty.

That's how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.

When we wake, it is because something, some event, some pinprick even, disturbs the edges of what we’ve taken as reality.

An inordinate love of ritual can be harmful to the soul, unless, of course, in times of great crisis, when ritual can protect the soul from fracture.

I had learned so much about the world that I had decided to withdraw from it.

The city might be savage, stray dogs might share the streets with grimy urchins whose blank eyes reflected the knowledge that they might soon be covered over, blinded forever, by the same two pennies just begged from some gentleman, and no one in the fuming, fulminous boulevards of trade might know who actually ran Ambergris-or, if anyone ran it at all, but, like a renegade clock, it ran on and wound itself heedless, empowered by the insane weight of its own inertia, the weight of its own citizenry.

Once you realize there's less logic in human institutions than you once thought, you see the narrative potential in just about everything around you. Sometimes, in fact, it seems as if the human world runs on inefficiency and erratic behavior.