“Ruthless is the temper of royalty; How much better to live among the equals.Let me decline in a safe old age. The very name of the "middle way".”

“Young, middle-aged, elderly, old, dead: this was how life conjugated. (No, life was a noun, so this is how life declined. Yes, that was better in any case, life declined.”

“Today’s middle class lives better than did the Royalty of not so long ago, and yet humans today don’t seem very happy.”

“No matter how old a mother is she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement.”

“Being an author of a book is like being a mother of a debutante in the Middle Ages. You have to present your baby to society and provide her with dowry, and in your heart, you hope that some royalty spends a night with her and ensures her way to success.”

“With false names, on the right nets, they could be anybody. Old men, middle-aged women, anybody, as long as they were careful about the way they wrote. All that anyone would see were the words, their ideas. Every citizen started equal, on the nets.”