K.W. Jeter

“Adventures, I reflected, are all very fine but a certain amount of civilised comfort forms the true kernel of our desires.”

“Over the vistas broke a cold gray light, such as seen in those false dawns that are neither night nor true morning, when the world and all its contents seem but shapes of mist, formed in vain hope and desire... If you awake from troubled sleep at such a time, you can only sit by the window and think of those that have been lost to you, those that followed your parents into those cold and heartless regions below the grass, silent and dark. Eventually, morning comes and the world resumes its solidity, but another tiny thread of ice has been stitched into your heart forever.”

“Creff was visibly agitated by the stranger's appearance at our door. Memory calls to mind the anxious wringing of his hands, resembling two furless pink badgers wrestling for each other's throats...”

“Tut, tut. We can't let mere sentiment intrude. This is Science.”

“It's one thing to face great odds, but even the smallest struggle, if undertaken without hope, looms and swells with the fatal poisons of despair.”

“...in an area such as this the possibility of violence for the sake of robbery or even mere amusement is always something to be reckoned with. Our little expeditionary party had tried to dress as plainly as possible, but our great-cloaks simply by their cleanliness attracted the sinister attention of the loiterers on the street.”

“I believe it " announced Tafe complacently. "That my dear " said Ambrose "is because you grew up in a rough and violent world here just managing to live from day to day is easily considered a miracle. You are able to accept the truth no matter how astonishing its guise. Whereas our friend Hocker here is steeped in the overweening rationalism of his time and could mentally dismiss a mastodon in front of him if it happened to be wearing the wrong school tie.”

“I had always thought myself to be a man of moderate passions indistinguishable in that respect from most Englishmen born to our logical and mannered times.”

“What is the future going to be like, then?' 'Hey, it's gonna be a gas,' Scape assured me. 'If you're into machines and stuff - like I am - you'd go for it. People are gonna have all kinds of shit. Do whatever they want with it. That's why it didn't faze me when ol' Bendray first told me about wanting to blow up the world. Hey - in the Future, everybody will want to!”

“That's what you get,' he said, nodding towards a group of the men engaged in some close-order military drill, 'when you give people Bibles and guns. You should give 'em either one or the other, but not both. It just messes up their brains.”

“And if I were to open you up - would you see anything less remarkable? Less intricately dazzling, in its squelching, spongy way? Lungs and heart and spleen, and all the rest - ticking away, as it were? Yet you walk down the boulevard, and pass any number of such wonderful devices, all ticking away as they walk, and think it no great marvel.”

“He turned away from me, the better to hide the exclamation of annoyance which he muttered under his breath; I caught only what seemed to be the syllable cog (perhaps a reference to my mechanical trade) and the word succour (a prayer for divine assistance?).”

“Creff, my factotum, interrupted the breakfast he had brought me only a few minutes earlier and announced that a crazed Ethiope was at the door, presumably to buy a watch.”

“Life's nothing but the beating you take before you die. And I've died so many times already. Killed and lost so much. The remains.”