“We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.”

“I had become a kind of information magpie, gathering to myself all manner of shiny scraps of fact and hokum and books and art-history and politics and music and film, and developing, too, a certain skill in manipulating and arranging these pitiful shards so that they glittered and caught the light. Fool's gold, or priceless nuggets mined from my singular childhood's rich bohemian seam? I leave it to others to decide.”

“He had picked up languages the way most sailors pick up diseases; languages were his gonorrhoea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague.”

“If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it.”

“we can best understand the nature of this culture if we say that it found its truest mirror in a corpse”

“We strive for heights bit our natures betray us, Chamcha thought; clowns in search of crowns. The bitterness overcame him”

“Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough.”