They were close to the end of the beginning . . .

Try any goddam thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, toss it. Toss it even if you love it.

If you can't laugh when things go bad--laugh and put on a little carnival--then you're either dead or wishing you were.

It means that no blue ribbon is forever. Someday - if the world doesn't explode itself in the meantime - someone will run a two-minute mile in the Olympics. It may take a hundred years or a thousand, but it will happen. Because there is no ultimate blue ribbon. There is zero, and there is eternity, and there is mortality, but there is no ultimate.

What if I fall?', Tim cried. Maerlyn laughed. 'Sooner or later, we all do.

He began to cry, not hysterically or screaming as people cry when concealed rage with tears, but with continuous sobs who has just discovered that he's alone and will be for long. He cried because safety and reason seemed to have left the world. Loneliness was a reality, but in this situation madness was also remotely a possibility.

A broken spoon may be a fork in disguise.