Talent was not rare; the ability to survive having it was.

I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor.

'It’s, like, one of them drug dealer boats,' Vic says, looking through his magic sight. 'Five guys on it. Headed our way.' He fires another round. 'Correction. Four guys on it.' Boom. 'Correction, they’re not headed our way anymore.' Boom. A fireball erupts from the ocean two hundred feet away. 'Correction. No boat.'

Constable Moore had reached the age when men can subject their bodies to the worst irritations - whisky, cigars, woolen clothes, bagpipes - without feeling a thing or, at least, without letting on.

They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right.

For a Westerner to trash Western culture is like criticizing our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere on the grounds that it sometimes gets windy, and besides, Jupiter's is much prettier. You may not realize its advantages until you're trying to breathe liquid methane.

The franchise and the virus work on the same principle, what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder ― its DNA ― Xerox it, and embed it in the fertile line of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines.