All the secrets of the world worth knowing are hiding in plain site.

After that, the book will fade, the way all books fade in your mind. But I hope you will remember this: A man walking fast down a dark lonely street. Quick steps and hard breathing, all wonder and need. A bell above a door and the tinkle it makes. A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.

When every single piece of media you consume is time-shifted, does that mean it's actually you that's time-shifted?

... nothing lasts long. We all come to life and gather allies and build empires and die, all in a single moment - maybe a single pulse of some giant processor somewhere.

Are there sexual fetishes that involve books? There must be. I try not to imagine how they might work.

...I can’t stop squirming. If fidgets were Wikipedia edits, I would have completely revamped the entry on guilt by now, and translated it into five new languages.

I feel a little whirl of dislocation -- the trademark sensation of the world being more closely knit together than you expected