“That is not grease upon your person, Mr Gage, it is blood - blood from the endless fight to steal power from a miserly and begrudging universe.”

“He imagined that the great dark abyss of space was alive and that he might attract its attention if he stared too long into it - that it might twist and stir and fix its pitiless gaze upon him.”

“Louie liked watching rain - it was always so sad and interesting at the same time, like sitting with a friend who was crying.”

“I had them running for two months once, so about one-fifty billion miles a second - those big numbers, sometimes they seem to stare right back at you, don't they?”

“Individual customs and taboos do sometimes present particular problems - the Dennash, for example, have various rituals associated with passing faecal matter that require considerable space and equipment, as well as a priest.”

“We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.”

“If little else, the brain is an educational toy.The problem with possessing such an engaging toy is that other people want to play with it, too. Sometime they'd rather play with yours than theirs. Or they object if you play with yours in a different manner from the way they play with theirs. The result is, a few games out of a toy department of possibilities are universally and endlessly repeated. If you don't play some people's game, they say that you have "lost your marbles," not recognizing that, while Chinese checkers is indeed a fine pastime, a person may also play dominoes, chess, strip poker, tiddlywinks, drop-the-soap or Russian roulette with his brain.”