Anyone who believes what a cat tells him deserves all he gets.

Loyalty was a great thing, but no lieutenants should be forced to choose between their leader and a circus with elephants.

It is a fool's prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak.

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

I am an academic," said Professor Mandalay, "and thus have no finely developed senses that would be comprehensible to anyone who has not ever needed to grade papers without actually reading the blessed things.

Soon enough his head would be swimming with tales of derring-do and high adventure, tales of beautiful maidens kissed, of evildoers shot with pistols or fought with swords, of bags of gold, of diamonds as big as the tip of your thumb, of lost cities and of vast mountains, of steam-trains and clipper ships, of pampas, oceans, deserts, tundra.

He had gone beyond the world of metaphor and simile into the place of things that are, and it was changing him.