I wondered how I looked to her, in that place, and knew that even in a place that was nothing but knowledge that was the one thing I could not know. That if I look inward I would see only infinite mirrors staring into myself for eternity.

They were not my friends, after all. They were just the people I went to school with.

Night was spreading slowly around the spinning Earth. It should have been full of pinpricks of light. It was not. There were five billion people down there. What was going to happen soon would make barbarism look like a picnic - hot, nasty, and eventually given over to the ants.

There are stories you build and there are stories you construct; then there are the stories that you hack out of rock removing all the things that are not the story.

I think hell is something you carry around with you, not somewhere you go.

Some hats can only be worn if you're willing to be jaunty, to set them at an angle and to walk beneath them with a spring in your stride as if you're only a step away from dancing. They demand a lot of you.

The problems with success, frankly, are infinitely preferable to the problems of failure.