My dinner party,' Miles grated. 'It's just breaking up.' And sinking. All souls feared lost.

Miles added it to his life's lessons list. Call it Rule 27B. Never make key tactical decisions while having electro-convulsive seizures.

Utterly bleak and black is not the sum of realism. All the other colors are real, too.

Events may be horrible or inescapable. Men have always a choice - if not whether, then how, they may endure.

You don't pay back your parents. You can't. The debt you owe them gets collected by your children, who hand it down in turn. It's a sort of entailment. Or if you don't have children of the body, it's left as a debt to your common humanity. Or to your God, if you possess or are possessed by one. The family economy evades calculation in the gross planetary product. It's the only deal I know where, when you give more than you get, you aren't bankrupted - but rather, vastly enriched.

I need words that mean more than they mean, words not just with height and width, but depth and weight and, and other dimensions that I cannot even name.

I do think, half of what we call madness is just some poor slob dealing with pain by a strategy that annoys the people around him.