“A scoundrel is an evil heliotrope turning always in the direction of the most powerful.”

“I knew the earth was rotating, and I with it, and Saint-Martin-des-Champs and all Paris with me, and that together we were rotating beneath the Pendulum, whose own plane never changed direction, because up there, along the infinite extrapolation of its wire beyond the choir ceiling, up toward the most distant galaxies, lay the Only Fixed Point in the universe, eternally unmoving.”

“People are never so completely and enthusiastically evil as when they act out of religious conviction.”

“The belief that time is a linear, directed sequence running from A to B is a modern illusion. In fact, it can also go from B to A, the effect producing the cause.”

“We were clever enough to turn a laundry list into poetry.”

“I was in a maze. No matter which way I turned, it was the wrong way.”

“This, in fact, is the power of the imagination, which, combining the memory of gold with that of the mountain, can compose the idea of a golden mountain.”