“The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle. He reasoned like this: you can't have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles -- kingons, or possibly queons -- that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expanded because, at that point, the bar closed.”

“His Greatness the King Pteppicymon XXVIII, Lord of the Heavens, Charioteer of the Wagon of the Sun, Steersman of the Barque of the Sun, Guardian of the Secret Knowledge, Lord of the Horizon, Keeper of the Way, the Flail of Mercy, the High Born One, the Never Dying King.”

“. . . you worked for Harry King, they said, because a broken leg was bad for business, and Harry King was all about business.”

“The cigar made its traverse from one side of Harry King to the other. He was known to dote on his daughters, who he felt had rather suffered from having a father who needed to take two baths just to get dirty.”

“Astfgl peered around through the swirling gas clouds. At least he was in the right place. The whole point about the end of the universe was that you couldn’t go past it accidentally.The last few embers winked out. Time and space collided silently, and collapsed.Astfgl coughed. It can get so very lonely, when you’re twenty million light-years from home.“Anyone there?” he said.YES.The voice was right by his ear. Even demon kings can shiver.“Apart from you, I mean,” he said. “Have you seen anybody?”YES.“Who?”EVERYONE.Astfgl sighed. “I mean anyone recently.”IT’S BEEN VERY QUIET, said Death.”

“Who did you pass on the road?" the King went on, holding out his hand to the Messenger for some more hay."Nobody," said the Messenger."Quite right," said the King; "this young lady saw him too. So of course Nobody walks slower than you.""I do my best," the Messenger said in a sullen tone. "I'm sure nobody walks much faster than I do!""He can't do that," said the King, "or else he'd have been here first.”

“Crowley had always known that he would be around when the world ended, because he was immortal and wouldn’t have any alternative. But he hoped it was a long way off. Because he rather liked people. It was major failing in a demon. Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse. Over the years Crowley had found it increasingly difficult to find anything demonic to do which showed up against the natural background of generalized nastiness. There had been times, over the past millennium, when he’d felt like sending a message back Below saying, Look we may as well give up right now, we might as well shut down Dis and Pandemonium and everywhere and move up here, there’s nothing we can do to them that they don’t do to themselves and they do things we’ve never even thought of, often involving electrodes. They’ve got what we lack. They’ve got imagination. And electricity, of course. One of them had written it, hadn’t he…”Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.”