“Being told off by Varley is like being savaged by a piece of lettuce.”

“You never get a second chance to make a first impression.”

“[M]y Coke hit the floor with a metallic clink, so much like the sound of a bullet casing being dropped.”

“I was used to being perceived as having a good attitude. Self-control, self-effacement, self-denial. People like this, especially in girls.”

“All the comics are sigils. "Sigil" as a word is out of date. All this magic stuff needs new terminology because it's not what people are being told it is at all. It's not all this wearying symbolic misdirection that's being dragged up from the Victorian Age, when no-one was allowed to talk plainly and everything was in coy poetic code. The world's at a crisis point and it's time to stop bullshitting around with Qabalah and Thelema and Chaos and Information and all the rest of the metaphoric smoke and mirrors designed to make the rubes think magicians are 'special' people with special powers. It's not like that. Everyone does magic all the time in different ways. "Life" plus "significance" = magic.”

“We are a nation equally afraid of gathering together and being alone.”

“That’s the trouble with being scared all the time. Eventually, people just go numb.”