“Really, he has only two emotions: sleeping and adrenaline overdrive.”

“He has reverted, in other words, back into a pure balls-to-the-wall nerdism rivaled only by his early game-coding days back in Seattle. The sheer depth and involution of the current nerdism binge would be hard to convey to anyone. Intellectually, he is juggling half a dozen lit torches, Ming vases, live puppies, and running chainsaws. In this frame of mind he cannot bring himself to give a shit about the fact that this incredibly powerful billionaire has gone to a lot of trouble to come and F2F with him.”

“Hiro feels even at this moment that something has been torn open in the world and that he is dangling above the gap, staring into a place where he does not want to be.”

“Two tires fly. Two Wail.A bamboo grove, all chopped downFrom it, warring songs.”

“Hiro is a talented drifter. This is the kind of lifestyle that sounded romantic to him as recently as five years ago. But in the bleak light of full adulthood, which is to one's early twenties as Sunday morning is to Saturday night, he can clearly see what it really amounts to: He's broke and unemployed.”

“Clearly Mr. Drkh has had a long career of being the weirdest person in any given room, but he's about to go down in flames.”

“‎...Gold is gold everywhere, fungible and indifferent. But when a disk of gold is stamped by a coiner with certain pompous words and the picture of a King, it takes on added value -- seigneurage. It has that value only in that people believe that it does -- it is a shared phant'sy.”