“And hither and thither fly--Mere puppets they, who come and go, At bidding of vast formless things, that shift the scenery to and fro.'"His voice was hushed and whispery in the earphones. "Mere puppets," he repeated. "It's Edgar Allen Poe.""So are we the vast formless things?""Yep."I grinned up at him. "Are you calling me fat and unshapely?"His low laugh tickled my ears. "Quite the contrary," he said. "Jacob can be vast, and I shall be formless. Your form is very pleasing.”

“Our age has built itself vast reservoirs of power / formless as the straining energy that it wrests from the earth.”

“If I determine the enemy's disposition of forces while I have no perceptible form, I can concentrate my forces while the enemy is fragmented. The pinnacle of military deployment approaches the formless: if it is formless, then even the deepest spy cannot discern it nor the wise make plans against it.”

“They belonged to that vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppets.”

“These creatures you call mice, you see, they are not quite as they appear. They are merely the protrusion into our dimension of vastly hyperintelligent pandimensional beings.”

“Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?”