“Well, once I had recovered from childbirth -" then she caught herself short, and smiled. "What a ridiculous expression; I see now that I shall be recovering until the day I die.”

“So through no rational process whatsoever I was the leader, And I had no idea what I was going to say.”

“Sorry,” she said, “I got out as fast as I could, but I had to stay and socialize. Protocol, you know.”“Explain protocol,” Nell said. This was how she always talked to the Primer.“At the place we’re going, you need to watch your manners. Don’t say ‘explain this’ or ‘explain that.’”“Would it impose on your time unduly to provide me with a concise explanation of the term protocol?” Nell said.Again Rita made that nervous laugh and looked at Nell with an expression that looked like poorly concealed alarm.”

“Y.T. is maxing at a Mom's Truck Stop on 405, waiting for her ride. Not that she would ever be caught dead at a Mom's Truck Stop. If, like, a semi ran her over with all eighteen of its wheels in front of a Mom's Truck Stop, she would drag herself down the shoulder of the highway using her eyelid muscles until she reached a Snooze 'n' Cruise full of horny derelicts rather than go into a Mom's Truck Stop.”

“The biggest machines, in those days, were already pushing the limits of what could be constructed on Arbre with reasonable amounts of money.""I hadn't known that," I said. "I always tend to assume there's an infinite amount of money out there.""There might as well be," Arsibalt said, "but most of it gets spent on pornography, sugar water, and bombs. There is only so much that can be scraped together for particle accelerators.”

“For most of the day and night, time oppresses me. It is only when I am at work on the innards of a clock-or a lock-that time stops.""The clock stops, you mean.""No. Time stops, or so it seems. I do not sense its passage. Then something interrupts me-I become aware that my bladder is full, my mouth dry, my stomach rumbling, the fire’s gone out, and the sun’s gone down. But there before me on the table is a finished clock-" now suddenly a snicker from the mechanism, and a deft movement of his hands. "Or an opened lock.”

“Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.”