“Little by little, the old world crumbled, and not once did the king imagine that some of the pieces might fall on him.”

“What happened to all the historical detritus in the world? Some of it made it into drawers of museums, okay, but what about all those old postcards, the photoplates, the maps on napkins, the private journals with little latches on them? Did they burn in house fires? Were they sold at yard sales for 75¢? Or did they all just crumble into themselves like everything else in this world, the secret little stories contained within their pages disappearing, disappearing, and now gone forever.”

“Well, I think we all started off as ash, astral ash; the Big Bang and all that. You and I - stardust. Maybe a little piece of me and a little piece of you were once companions on some great cosmic dust making its way to this rock.”

“As always, I am saved by the inability of living creatures to believe anything that might cause the walls of their little mental assumptions to crumble.”

“If we hadn't hated him a lot, we might have liked him a little at that moment. But we did. So we didn't.”

“Plum puffs can't minister to a mind diseased or a world that's crumbling to pieces”