Nobody wants to conduct an autopsy on a dead saint.

Ecstasy hates company.

There's no drug that'll make a stupid man smart.

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 .

I won't put my ignorance on an altar and call it God. It feels like idolatry, like the worst kind of idolatry.

Average people seldom talked about anything interesting and often hurt each other savagely.

[There was] only one news channel, overseen by a bland and complexly multicultural board of advisors. It broadcast in fifteen languages and was, as a rule, interesting in none of them.