[Oedipa Maas] awoke at last to find herself getting laid.

Murphy's Law, that brash proletarian restatement of Godel's Theorem.

She thougt of sunrise over the library slope at Cornell University that nobody out on it had seen because the slope faces west.

Like so many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts--census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway.

To have humanism we must first be convinced of our humanity. As we move further into decadence this becomes more difficult.

Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendent meaning, or only the earth.

There are stories, like maps that agree... too consistent among too many languages and histories to be only wishful thinking.... It is always a hidden place, the way into it is not obvious, the geography is as much spiritual as physical. If you should happen upon it, your strongest certainty is not that you have discovered it but returned to it. In a single great episode of light, you remember everything.