Evolution can't be predicted, Julian used to tell me; it's a scattershot business; it fires, but it doesn't aim.

What we cannot remember, we must rediscover.

The suicidally disgruntled were legion, And their enemies included any and all Americans, Brits, Canadians, Danes, et cetera; or, conversely, all Moslems, dark-skinned people, non-English-speakers, immigrants; all Catholics, fundamentalists, atheists; all liberals, all conservatives...For such people the consummate act of moral clarity was a lynching or a suicide bombing, a fatwa or a pogrom. And they were ascendant now, rising like dark stars over a terminal landscape.

Promises were like bad checks, easy to write and hard to cash.

I believed there were no Hypotheticals in the sense of consciously acting agents - conscious entities. There was only the process. The needles of evolution, endlessly knitting.

This would have been less annoying had it been untrue.

Children wear their natures like brightly-colored clothes; that's why they lie so transparently. Adulthood is the art of deceit.