Take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. and yet... and yet you act as if there is some ideal order in the world, as if there is some... some rightness in the universe by which it may be judged.

It was the living who ignored the strange and wonderful, because life was too full of the boring and mundane.

Ultimately, there is the freedom to take the consequences.

Priests were metal-reinforced overshoes. They saved your soles. This is an Assassin joke.

Just to keep bad dreams at bay, she took a swig out of a bottle that smelled of apples and happy brain-death.

Raise the stakes! Always push your luck because no one else would push it for you.

At some time in the recent past someone had decided to brighten the ancient corridors of the University by painting them, having some vague notion that Learning Should Be Fun. It hadn’t worked. It’s a fact known throughout the universes that no matter how carefully the colors are chosen, institutional decor ends up as either vomit green, unmentionable brown, nicotine yellow or surgical appliance pink. By some little-understood process of sympathetic resonance, corridors painted in those colors always smell slightly of boiled cabbage—even if no cabbage is ever cooked in the vicinity.