“Like a Chinese box, the world of the novel contained smaller worlds, and inside those were yet smaller worlds. Together, these worlds made up a single universe, and the universe waited there in the book to be discovered by the reader.”

“In its quest to discover how the patterns of reality are organised, the story of modern science hints at a picture of a set of Chinese puzzle boxes, each one more intricately structured and wondrous than the last. Every time the final box appears to have been reached, a key has been found which has opened up another, revealing a new universe even more breathtakingly improbable in its conception. We are now forced to suspect that, for human reason, there is no last box, that in some deeply mysterious, virtually unfathomable, self-reflective way, every time we open a still smaller box, we are actually being brought closer to the box with which we started, the box which contains our own conscious experience of the world. This is why no theory of knowledge, no epistemology, can ever escape being consumed by its own self-generated paradoxes. And this is why we must consider the universe to be irredeemably mystical.”

“We're much closer together in the world today than we were in the past. Given that it is a much smaller world, we are in a stronger position to shape that world. As we enter the new century, and a new millennium, let us create a world in which there is no longer any war or any conflict.”

“No, it wasn't aging that made someone brittle, it was disappointment that did. It was allowing the world to make you smaller and smaller until you couldn't hold yourself upright anymore. That, that made a woman break.”

“The world the gods made is too big for us, so we make ourselves a smaller one.”

“The real world is much smaller than the imaginary”