“How dense and literal it is. I thought it had a much more sophisticated brain." "Your mother is dense," Alif said wearily. "My mother was an errant crest of sea foam. But that is neither here nor there.”

“The sea stood up before him, foaming, torn by lightning bolts, opening terrifying mouths that gobbled up the dense, hard black rains unleashed by the sky like hate.”

“There was a dense fog in my brain,impenetrable to any coherent thought,except the dull obsession of counting the minutes - an aching state of semi concsiousness and numb idiocy.”

“My mother always said that I would come to a bad end but I never thought she meant this - writing allegory in literal times.”

“Ravelstein mentioned that Keynes had married a Russian ballerina. He also explained to me that Uranus had fathered Aphrodite but that she had had no mother. She was conceived by the sea foam. He would say such things not because he thought I was ignorant of them but because he judged that I needed at a given moment to have my thoughts directed toward them.”

“Mothers can be so dense. Just act like you approve of what we're doing. We'll soon do the exact opposite, just to spite you.”