If you can't stop the bad thoughts from coming to visit, at least you can make fun of them while they're hanging around.

The human mind isn't a terribly logical or consistent place. Most people, given the choice to face a hideous or terrifying truth or to conveniently avoid it, choose the convenience and peace of normality. That doesn't make them strong or weak people, or good or bad people. It just makes them people.

I know how you feel," I said. "You run into something you totally don't get, and it's scary as hell. But once you learn something about it, it gets easier to handle. Knowledge counters fear. It always has.

[Mouse is] with us. The dog is a handicap-assist animal." The kid lifted his eyebrows. "My mouth is partially paralyzed," I said. "It makes it hard for me to rea. He's here to help me with the big words. Tell me if I'm supposed to push or pull on doors, that kind of thing.

Karrin Murphy led the charge, and Sanya and I tried to keep up. She went through that sea of foes like a little speedboat, her enemies spun and tossed and turned and disoriented in her wake. Sanya and I hacked our way through stunned foes, pushing and chopping with unsophisticated brutality-and that big Russian lunatic just kept laughing the whole time.

...It's just one hour. Just one little hour. What could happen in one hour?

Paradox is an overrated threat. There is...a quality similar to inertia at work. Once an event has occurred, there is an extremely strong tendency for that event to occur. The larger, more significant, or more energetic the event, the more it tends to remain as it originally happened, despite any interference." I frowned. "There's...a law of conservation of history?