"Integrity is a bugger, it really is. Lying can get you into difficulties, but to really wind up in the crappers try telling nothing but the truth."

"The truth is "#9dream" is a descendant of "Norwegian Wood". Both are ghost stories. "She" in "Norwegian Wood" curses you with loneliness. The "Two spirits dancing so strange" in "#9dream" bless you with harmony. But people prefer loneliness to harmony."

"After years of working with missionaries, I am tempted to conclude that their endeavors merely prolong a dying race's agonies for ten or twenty years. The merciful plowman shoots a trusty horse grown too old for service. As philanthropists, might it not be our duty to likewise ameliorate the savages' sufferings by hastening their extinction? Think of your Red Indians, Adam, think on the treaties you Americans abrogate & renege on, time & time & time again. More humane, surely & more honest, just to knock the savages on the head & get it over with?"

"There no such thing as something! Why? Because everything's already turning into something else!"

"The last of the cherry blossom. On the tree, itturns ever more perfect. And when it's perfect, it falls. And then of course once it hits theground it gets all mushed up. So it's only absolutely perfect when it's falling through the air,this way and that, for the briefest time!.!.!."

"Here's the truth: Who is spared love is spared grief."

"What sparks wars? The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence, is the instrument of this dreadful will. You can see the will to power in bedrooms, kitchens, factories, unions and the borders of states. Listen to this and remember it. The nation state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions. QED, nations are entities whose laws are written by violence. Thus it ever was, so ever shall it be."

"Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud an' so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud's blowed from or who the soul'll be 'morrow? Only Sonmi the east an' the west an' the compass an' the atlas, yay, only the atlas o' clouds."

"Rootlessness," I opine, "is the twenty-first century norm.""You're not wrong and that's why we're in the shit we're in, mate. If you belong nowhere, why give a tinker's toss about anywhere?"

"I lost my balance when the train pulled away, but a human crumple zone buffered my fall. We stayed like that, half fallen. Diagonal People."

"When you win, the rules change, and you find you've lost."

"So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?"

"Trees're always a relief, after people."

"The pollenless trees were genomed to repel bugs and birds, the stagnant air reeked of insecticide."

"Think larger. Redraw what is possible."

"Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms round the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage."

"But to what end? Some... future revolution? It can never succeed.As Seneca warned Nero: No matter how many of us you kill, you will never kill your successor."

"A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it."

"Peace, though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience."

"I wonder who had the first computer dream, where, and when? I wonder if computers ever dream of humans."

"After ten pages I felt that Nietzsche was reading me, not I him."

"Secrets affect you more than you'd think. You lie to keep them hidden. You steer talk away from them. You worry someone'll discover yours and tell the world. You think you are in charge of the secret, but isn't it the secret who's actually using you?"

"Like Solzhenitsyn, I shall return, one bright dusk."

"Answering the question 'How would you like to smell?' by saying 'I'd rather I didn't' is also no longer acceptable. It's not playing the game. Men are expected to put some cash into the cosmetic pot too - it's seen as almost un-feminist not to. What a uniquely capitalist response to that gender inequality: women have been forced by convention for generations - millennia - to spend money on expensive clothes and agonising shoes, to daub themselves with reality-concealing slap, to smell expensively inhuman, to self-mutilate in pursuit of eternal youth; and this, quite rightly, has come to be deemed unfair. But how do we end this hell? We make men do it too. Well done everyone."

"As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory."

"He thinks of the all steps that gathered this party and marvels at the weaverless looms of fortune."

"The downside is the fear.The fear of something happening to her, the pressure of there being two bodies in the world that I want to keep from harm and only being able to watchfully inhabit one of them. I wonder if you know what I mean.I hope you do for your sake."

"Not a clue " and, no, I don't touch drugs. The world's unstable enough without scrambling your brain for kicks."

"The human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature."

"Trees, their incremental gymnastics and noisy silence, are another wonder of Outside to me."

"The sun was deaf'nin' so high up, yay, it roared an' time streamed from it."

"Holly rubs her temples. "Are we talking ... vampires?Arkady groans. "On, the V-word! Here it comes again."

"This isn't lust. Lust wants, does the obvious, and pads back into the forest. Love is greedier. Love wants round-the-clock care; protection; rings, vows, joint accounts; scented candles on birthdays; life insurance. Babies. Love's a dictator."

"The silences after his last gasp were sung together by a blackbird. I lay there, my eyes unable to close. His were unable to open. I listed the places where I hurt, and how much. My loins felt ripped. Something inside had torn. There were seven places on my body where he had sunk his fangs into my skin and bitten. He'd dug his nails into my neck, and twisted my head to one side, and clawed my face. I hadn't made a noise. He had made all the noise for both of us. Had it hurt him?"

"Human cruelty can be infinite. Human generosity can be boundless."

"You only value something if you know it'll end."

"There're times when i suspect that the mind has a mind of its own. it shows us pictures. pictures of the past and the might-one-day-be. this mind's mind exerts its own will, too, and has its own voice."

"Young mothers are the most vicious tribe in the world if you don't fit in."

"Disco's are tricky. You look a total wally if you dance too early but after one crucial song tips the disco over, you look a sad saddo if you don't."

"Glass & peace alike betray proof of fragility under repeated blows."

"At dawn the waves looked like mountain ranges tipped with gold as sunbeams slanted low under burgundy clouds."

"I asked, how is knowledge found? 'You must learn how to read, little sister,' he said."

"Travel far enough, you meet yourself."

"When I'm in doubt - as I am now - I ask myself, 'What would Carl Jung do?' - and act accordingly."

"This society doesn't work without booze " our parties aren't good enough, our conversations aren't sufficiently interesting, nor is our self-confidence high enough to sustain our interactions without alcohol. It's everywhere, lubricating everything."

"Perfume counters in department stores, Holly Deblin smells of, the middle of July, and cinnamon Tic Tacs."

"Right, my phone. When these things first appeared, they were so cool. Only when it was too late did people realize they are as cool as electronic tags on remand prisoners."

"There are different ways people make this place. Sweat, exercise and pain is one way. You can see them in the gyms, in the well-ordered swimming pools. You can see them jogging in the small, worn parks. Another way to make your place is TV. A bright, brash place, always well lit, full of fun and jokes that tell you when to laugh so you never miss them. World news carefully edited so that it's not too disturbing, but disturbing enough to make you glad that you weren't born in a foreign country. News with music to tell you who to hate, who to feel sorry for, and who laugh at."

"Any society's upper-crust is riddled with immorality, how else d'you think they keep their power? Reputation is king of the public sphere, not private. It is dethroned by public acts."

"Don't worry, all is well. All is so perfectly, damnably well."