“As long as it had remained a mystery, I could have dealt with it--no matter how enormous a mystery it became. Now that matters had gotten more specific, my imagination began supplying smells and textures.”

“I had never ironed anything in my life. The proper pressing of a shirt was a mystery of the universe akin to black holes and dark matter.”

“Sometimes it didn't matter how much gumption you had. What mattered were the cards you'd been dealt.”

“And what agony, thought Krug the thinker, to love so madly a little creature, formed in some mysterious fashion (even more mysterious to us than it had been to the very first thinkers in their pale olive gloves) by the fusion of two mysteries, or rather two sets of a trillion of mysteries each; formed by a fusion which is, at the same time, a matter of choice and a matter of chance and a matter of pure enchantment; thus formed and then permitted to accumulate trillions of its own mysteries; the whole suffused with consciousness, which is the only real thing in the world and the greatest mystery of all.”

“I had no idea what time I’d left, how I’d gotten home, who’d been up here, and how long he, she, or they had stayed. Another night, added to the hundreds that had gone before, shrouded in mystery. Really, when you thought about it, it was creepy. My own life was a secret to me.”

“I had two beady brown eyes that, no matter how hard I tried to look mysterious and cool, always seemed to say "It wasn't just me who farted.”