"In fact, the room was so quiet you might have heard a drop of paint splash."

"Try to be pleasant to one another, get plenty of fresh air, read a good book now and then, depose your government when it suspends the free press, try to use the mechanism of the state to adjudicate fairly and employ diplomatic means wherever possible to avoid armed conflict."

"Soothsayers are like that. They see many futures but never their own."

"How about this,' I said. 'We modify our plans with regard to ongoing facts as they become known to us, then remodify them as the situation unfolds. 'You mean make it all up as we go along?' asked Perkins.'Right."

"Marriage is an honorable estate and should not be used simply as an excuse for legal intercourse."

"The very possibility of death focuses the mind wonderfully."

"Although her mouth uttered fond words, her eyes spoke only venom."

"Those that can be troubled to muse upon the meaning of life are general disappointed when they figure it out."

"The sky was like ebony and the only illumination was the harsh white light of the central streetlamp, which cast shadows so hard it seemed you might cut yourself on them."

"When she turned I could see her face was plain and outwardly unremarkable, yet possessing of a bearing that showed inner strength and resolve. I stared at her intently with a mixture of feelings. I had realised not long ago that I was no beauty, and even at the age of nine had seen how the more attractive children gained favour more easily. But here in that young woman I could see how those principles could be inverted. I felt myself stand more upright and clench my jaw in subconscious mimicry of her pose."

"I don't need you to agree with me," she said quietly." I'll go away happy with a little bit of doubt. Doubt is good. It's an emotion we can build on. Perhaps if we feed it with curiosity it will blossom into something useful, like suspicion - and action."

"Dead. Never been that before. Not even once."

"Have you ever wondered how nostalgia isn"t what it used to be?"

"But that was what research and development were like. Full of semi-triumphs and perplexing unforeseen consequences like the whole violent hiccuping thing when conjuring up fire - or the propensity for fillings to fall out of bystanders' teeth when attempting to tease a rainstorm out of a cloud."

"For myself, I favored the abstract. I collected not just obsolete terms and words, but ideas."

"Literary detection and firearms don't really go hand in hand, pen mighter than the sword and so forth."

"For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert."

"Her majesty is one verb short of a sentence."

"All of everything came into existence simply because it wanted to be. The big bang wasn't so much a big bang as a hasty dash toward an opportunity to trade nothingness for somethingness. The main contributory factor to the entire universe was a momentary effect in need of a cause."

"Believe me, you're going to have to do much worse than this--in the pursuit of freedom, the innocents will suffer--and at your hands."

"Edward, Edward," he said with a patronising smile, "there are no unanswered questions of any relevance. Every question that we need to ask has been answered fully. If you can't find the correct answer then you are obviously asking the wrong question."

"I am boring, but I'm ok with it. I'm the anchor, the shoulder...I'm an average man...with a truly extraordinary wife."

"Death, I had discovered long ago, was available in varying flavors, and none of them particularly palatable."

"You want me to spy on a National Colour operative?''Wow,' she said, 'you got it. I thought I was going to have to explain that one for a lot longer."

"Prices of semicolons, plot devices, prologues and inciting incidents continued to fall yesterday, lopping twenty points off the TomJones Index."

"A surfeit of information often hides an untruth, he said, with annoying clarity."

"Vanity's contribution to Fiction in general was an abundance of cheap labour and the occasional blockbuster, which was accepted into Fiction with an apologetic 'gosh, don't know how that happened'."

"I hope that in my books there's an undertone of politics, basic tenets of how we should live."

"The known had been so long dwarfed by the unknown that confusion was an easy bedfellow."

"True and baseless evil is as rare as the purest good--and we all know how rare that is..."

"I was in '78 recently," he announced. "I brought you this."He handed me a single by the Beatles. I didn't recognize the title."Didn't they split in '70?""Not always. How are things?"

"Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It's the crack cocaine of the literary world."

"She had large, questioning eyes that seemed to draw me in and a sense of quiet outrage that simmered just beneath the surface. More than anything, within her features, there was a streak of wild quirkiness that made her dazzlingly attractive."

"Honor is kind of what you get when you weaponize manners."

"I'm beginning to think you're the sort of person who does a great deal with very little."He meant a liar."

"Another one of your quippy japes?"

"So my humor, I'd say, comes from a mixture of lowbrow comedy shows and highbrow theater. It's an interesting mix."

"I think Wordsworth was as surprised to see me as I was him. It can't be usual to go to your favorite memory only to find someone already there, admiring the view ahead of you."

"Never underestimate the capacity for romance, no matter what the circumstances."

"PDR: Persons of Dubious Reality; refugees from the collective consciousness. Uninvited visitors who have fallen through the grating that divides the real, from the written. They arrive with their actions hardwired due to their repetitious existence and the older and more basic they are, the more rigidly they stick to them. Characters from cautionary tales are particularly mindless; they do what they do because it's what they've always done.And it's our job to stop them."

"You're just a huge romantic at heart, aren't you?""If there's cash involved, I'm anything you want me to be."

"There is no point in expending good money on the pursuit of an engine that can power aircraft without propellers. What is wrong with airships anyway? They have borne mankind aloft for over a hundred relatively accident-free years and I see no reason to impugn their popularity..."

"Cash is always the deciding factor in such matters of moral politics, nothing ever gets done unless motivated by commerce or greed."

"I'm sure it's not all hot buttered crumpets out there in the breathing world of asphalt and heartbeats."

"The best reason for committing loathsome and detestable acts--and let's face it, I am considered something of an expert in this field--is purely for their own sake. Monetary gain is all very well, but it dilutes the taste of wickedness to a lower level that is obtainable by anyone with an overdeveloped sense of avarice. True and baseless evil is as rare as the purest good--and we all know how rare that is..."

"Now and again. Good residency is about having the power to ask someone to do something, but not necessarily exercising it."

"Pretty?' I said, swivelling in the driver's seat to face him, 'you want to ask me out because I'm pretty?' 'Is there a problem with asking you out because you're pretty?' 'I think you blew it,' said Tiger with a grin. 'You should be asking her out because she's smart, witty, mature beyond her years and every moment in her company makes you want to be a better person - pretty of face should be at the bottom of the list.' 'Oh, blast,' said Perkins despondently. 'It should, shouldn't it?"

"She wasn't the only one to be physically morphed by reader expectation. Miss Havisham was now elderly whether she liked it or not, and Sherlock Holmes wore a deerstalker and smoked a ridiculously large pipe. The problem wasn't just confined to the classics. Harry Potter was seriously pissed off that he'd have to spend the rest of life looking like Daniel Radcliffe."

"Books" - Snell smiled - "are a kind of magic."

"Bowden Cable is the sort of honest and dependable operative that is the backbone of SpecOps. They never win commendations or medalsand the public has no knowledge of them at all. They are all worth ten of people like me."