The most heartbreakingly beautiful girl I ever hope to see

The painting was framed in a misty view of sky, sea, and valley. Newt's painting was small, black, and warty. It consisted of scratches made in a black, gummy impasto. The scratches formed a sort of spider's web, and I wondered if they might not be the sticky nets of human futility hung up on a moonless night to dry.

If you can't write clearly, you probably don't think nearly as well as you think you do.

...we took the 10 machines we agreed were the most beguiling, and we put them on permanent exhibit in the foyer of this library underneath a sign whose words can surely be applied to this whole ruined planet nowadays: THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE

I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.

Reading a novel, War and Peace for example, is no Catnap. Because a novel is so long, reading one is like being married forever to somebody nobody knows or cares about.

It is time for me to be dead for a little while - and then live again.