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

Thats how we survive infinity - we kill it by breaking it up into small bits.

History isn't like that. History unravels gently, like an old sweater. It has been patched and darned many times, reknitted to suit different people, shoved in a box under the sink of censorship to be cut up for the dusters of propaganda, yet it always - eventually - manages to spring back into its old familar shape. History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it. History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It's been around a long time.

The truth is that even big collections of ordinary books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, one that looks as though they were designed by M. Escher on a bad day and has more stairways than storeys and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that are surely too small for a full-sized human to enter. The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.

It was sad music. But it waved its sadness like a battle flag. It said the universe had done all it could, but you were still alive.

Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.

Everything is a test.