“It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn't stand was a smartass.”

“When asked what characteristics Nobel prize winning physicists had in common ؛ I cannot think of a single one, not even intelligence”

“The available worlds looked pretty grim. They had little to offer him because he had little to offer them. He had been extremely chastened to realize that although he originally came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and Armagnac, he didn't, by himself, know how any of it worked. He couldn't do it. Left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it.”

“For that pony had got tangled up in the cowboy's heartstrings a heap more than that cowboy wanted to let on, even to himself. He couldn't get away from how he missed him.”

“The therapist, he thought, and it bothered him a lot more than it should have. After all, he had nothing permanent with Sophie. He just needed to touch her on a semiregular basis or he couldn't finish his sentences.”

“Back at home, after some prodding from Tereza, he admitted that he had been jealous watching her dance with a colleague of his. "You mean you were really jealous?" she asked him ten times or more, incredulously, as though someone had just informed her she had been awarded a Nobel Peace prize. Then she put her arm around his waist and began dancing across the room. The step she used was not the one she had shown off in the bar. It was more like a village polka, a wild romp that sent her legs flying in the air and her torso bounding all over the room, with Tomas in tow. Before long, unfortunately, she bagan to be jealous herself, and Tomas saw her jealously not as a Nobel Prize, but as a burden, a burden he would be saddled with until not long before his death.”