The trouble with shooting people, Edie Banister now remembers, is that it's so hard to do just one.

Society is based on discontent: people wanting more and more and more, being continually dissatisfied with their homes, their bodies, their decor, their clothes, everything.

Newton's work on gravity led to the discovery of the Lagrange point, a place where opposing forces cancel one another out, and a body may remain at relative rest. This is where I am right now; the forces in my life confound one another. Better, for the moment, to be here and now, without history or future.

That's what you get for ignoring the beauty of Tupperware.

Never mind, never mind, let's get to the part where we smite the unrighteous. I've brought my most alarming teeth!

It's not that any sufficiently advanced technology is magic, it's that any technology taking place beyond the threshold of our senses is.

A cherry pie is . . . ephemeral. From the moment it emerges from the oven it begins a steep decline: from too hot to edible to cold to stale to mouldy, and finally to a post-pie state where only history can tell you that it was once considered food. The pie is a parable of human life.