What goes around may come around, but it never ends up exactly the same place, you ever notice? Like a record on a turntable, all it takes is one groove's difference and the universe can be on into a whole 'nother song.

If there is something comforting - religious, if you want - about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.

What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?

The hand of Providence creeps among the stars, giving Slothrop the finger.

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

In recent weeks, in true messianic style, it has come clear to her that her real identity is literally, the force of gravity. I am Gravity, I am That against which the Rocket must struggle, to which prehistoric wastes submit and are transmuted to the very substance of History.

Get too conceptual, too cute and remote, and your characters die on the page.