“The key to excellent report writing' he said between chews, 'is to take every bit of passion out of it. Use an extra heaping portion of superflously extraneous tautological redundancies in order to make it mind-numbingly boring. So that when one's superior officers read it, they zone out and start skimming and maybe don't notice the fact that one has been spinning one's wheels since the body turned up and hasn't solved a goddamn thing.”

“So convenient a thing to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.”

“A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems. And not only so. It gives a relish, and facility, for successfully pursuing the [yet] unsolved ones.”

“He lifted the slice of cake and bit into it and turned the page. The old musty album with its foxed and crumbling paper seemed to breathe a reek of the vault, turning up one by one these dead faces with their wan and loveless gaze out toward the spinning world, masks of incertitude before the cold glass eye of the camera or recoiling before this celluloid immortality or faces simply staggered into gaga by the sheer velocity of time. Old distaff kin coughed up out of the vortex, thin and cracked and macled and a bit redundant. The landscapes, old backdrops, redundant too, recurring unchanged as if they inhabited another medium than the dry pilgrims shored up on them. Blind moil in the earth's nap cast up in an eyeblink between becoming and done. I am, I am. An artifact of prior races.”

“The infinite distance between body and mind symbolizes the infinitely more infinite distance between mind and charity, for charity is supernatural....Out of all bodies together we could not succeed in creating one little thought. It is impossible, and of a different order. Out of all bodies and minds we could not extract one impulse of true charity. It is impossible, and of a different, supernatural, order.”

“No one on earth is so boring and insignificant that he or she is not worth writing or reading about...One thing's for sure—no one but you can be the hero of your story.”