Someday it'll all be done by machine. Information machines.

Shall I project a world?

My belief is that "recluse" is a code word generated by journalists... meaning, "doesn't like to talk to reporters."

It is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice - guessed and refused to believe - that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return. Yet they do move forever under it, reserved for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the rainbow, and they its children...

He decided that we suffer from great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in.

Life's single lesson: that there is more accident to it than a man can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane.

Liebig himself seems to have occupied the role of a gate, or sorting-demon, such as his younger contemporary Clerk Maxwell once proposed, helping to concentrate energy into one favored room of the Creation at the expense of everything else.