“Newt Gingrich, Reagan reflected, had never in his life fit properly into a suit. He still looked like the fat, despised, teacher’s-pet, suck-up junior debating whiz who was going to fall apart in his senior year, except he was now fifty years past it. Back when I was alive, he had that same querulous expression of a guy who didn’t understand two big things:
1. being smart doesn’t make you popular, and2. even if it did, he isn’t smart enough for it to work for him.He remembered trying to explain it to Nancy, who had told him that, “Ronnie, granted that Newt is sometimes irritating, you have to admit he’s brighter than most Congressmen—”“So is every horse out at Rancho del Cielo, Mommy, and half the rocks for that matter,” he’d said.”

“He thinks I love him. As in… in love with him. Yeah. Go fig. Me in love with Qhuinn… a guy who, when he’s not moody, is a slut and smart-ass. Except you want to know what the most fucked-up thing is, though? He’s right.”

“Sometimes it amazed him. Lanky Thom with his white hair and mustaches, who had been a Queen’s lover once, and more willingly than himself, not to mention more than a lover, if you believed half he said. Square-jawed Harnan with that tattoo on his cheek and more elsewhere, who had been a soldier all his life. Juilin with his bamboo staff and his sword-breaker on his hip, who thought himself as good as any lord even if the idea of carrying a sword himself still made him uneasy, and fat Vanin, who made Juilin look a bootlicker by comparison. Skinny Fergin, and Gorderan, nearly as wide in the shoulders as Perrin, and Metwyn, whose pale Cairhienin face still looked like a boy’s despite being years older than Mat. Some of them followed Mat Cauthon because they thought he was lucky, because his luck might keep them alive when the swords were out, and some for reasons he was not really sure of, but they followed. Not even Thom had ever more than protested an order of his. Maybe Renaile had been more than luck. Maybe his being ta’veren did more than dump him in the-middle of trouble. Suddenly he felt... responsible... for these men. It was an uncomfortable feeling. Mat Cauthon and responsibility did not go together. It was unnatural.”

“When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened”

“After he saw God [Tony Amsterdam] felt really good, for around a year. And then he felt really bad. Worse than he ever had before in his life. Because one day it came over him, he began to realize, that he was never going to see God again; he was going to live out his whole remaining life, decades, maybe fifty years, and see nothing but what he had always seen. What we see. He was worse off than if he hadn’t seen God. He told me one day he got really mad; he just freaked out and started cursing and smashing things in his apartment. He even smashed his stereo. He realized he was going to have to live on and on like he was, seeing nothing. Without any purpose. Just a lump of flesh grinding along, eating, drinking, sleeping, working, crapping.” “Like the rest of us.” It was the first thing Bob Arctor had managed to say; each word came with retching difficulty. Donna said, “That’s what I told him. I pointed that out. We were all in the same boat and it didn’t freak the rest of us. And he said, ‘You don’t know what I saw. You don’t know.’ ”

“When Marco Polo came at last to Cathay, seven hundred years ago, did he not feel--and did his heart not falter as he realized--that this great and splendid capital of an empire had had its being all the years of his life and far longer, and that he had been ignorant of it? That it was in need of nothing from him, from Venice, from Europe? That it was full of wonders beyond his understanding? That his arrival was a matter of no importance whatever? We know that he felt these things, and so has many a traveler in foreign parts who did not know what he was going to find. There is nothing that cuts you down to size like coming to some strange and marvelous place where no one even stops to notice that you stare about you.”