“There's a sameness to streetlife. On every world I've ever been, the same underlying patterns play out, flaunt and vaunt, buy and sell, like some distilled essence of human behavior seeping out from whatever clanking political machine has been dropped on it from above.”

“It suddenly occurred to me that every move on the chessboard is old and has been played by somebody at some time. Maybe our own history has been played out by somebody at some time, and we just move our pieces about in the same moves to strike in the same way as people have always done.”

“I`d love to sell out completely. It`s just that nobody has been willing to buy.”

“Behold the stars and planets all making their grand patterns above while the waves beneath play others; then there are the patterns in and between the patterns. Are they all synchronistic. . . . Can such a thing as one pattern be distilled from all? . . . the patterns seem harmonic and chaotic, in mind as in matter.”

“There's never been a rule of human behavior that hasn't been broken by someone, somewhere, sometime, in some circumstance mundane or spectacular. To be human is to transcend the rules.”

“Meet every man as you find him, for we're all made the same under habit, robe or rags. Some better made than others, and some better cared for, but on the same pattern, all.”