“I had a lot of other ideas, now and then, but every time I took a second look at one, it got sick and died.”

“It was a bland, tranquilized, life-adjusted, group-integrated sort of face -- the face turned out in thousands of copies every year by the educational production lines on Terra.”

“English is the product of a Saxon warrior trying to make a date with an Angle bar-maid, and as such is no more legitimate than any of the other products of that conversation.”

“I like it where it gets dark at night, and if you want noise, you have to make it yourself.”

“Take a drink because you pity yourself, and then the drink pities you and has a drink, and then two good drinks get together and that calls for drinks all around.”

“Sanity, it would seem, was a dangerously contagious disease.”

“Inside, a piece of him cracked; it was as though an emotion that had calcified into bone got tapped with a tiny hammer and splintered straight through.”