“لم تعد المملكة جنّة السلم الإجتماعي كما وصفها المراقبون من قبل، وباتت مكشوفة أيضًا أمام تعبير احتجاجي مستمدّ من مصدر كانت تعتقد أنها تحتكره ... أعني بذلك الإسلام . ”

“But it seemed like the more we advanced, the more the future looked impossible, making us return to the more radical times in the past.”

“Men are destroyed, and destroy each other, over basic things – money or hatred. On the other hand a really complicated riddle never pushed anyone to violence; either you found the answer or gave up looking. Clouds were riddles too, but dangerously simple ones. If you zoomed in on one part of a cloud and took a photograph, then enlarged the image, you would find that a cloud’s edges seemed like another cloud, and those edges yet another, and so on. Every part of a cloud, in other words, reiterates the whole. Therefore each cloud might be called infinite, because its very surface is composed of other clouds, and those clouds of still other clouds, and so forth. Some learn to lean over the abyss of these brainteasers; others lose their balance and tumble into its eternal blackness.”

“What we call 'time' isn't chronological but spatial; what we call 'death' is merely a transition between different kinds of matter.”

“There is something almost insane about countries without common borders going to war, something unnatural.”

“Of all the world's civilizations, America was the one that most needed losers.”

“One dead body required two men either to bury it or to transport it to the rear. A wounded soldier, on the other hand, immobilized five men for an indeterminate amount of time; and who knew whether it was even worth the effort.”