The TV's the altar. I'm what people are sacrificing to. "What do they sacrifice?" asked Shadow. "Their time, mostly," said Lucy. "Sometimes each other."

I didn't ask why anybody would want to risk the electric two-step on the tracks because, as police, all three of us knew that there wasn't anything so stupid that somebody wouldn't try it sooner or...

We are now living in an age which doubts both fact and value. It is the life of this age that we wish to see and judge.

India is not an underdeveloped country but a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay.

One of the compensations for wearing a uniform and earning less money than an equally talented man can make in the real world is the off chance of being killed.

Let's be friends based on mutual hate. - Wallace Wells Listen to this, okay? Just listen. You hear that? That's market bacon hitting the pan. Today a child is born unto us, and his name will be bacon....

Over the past thirty years we have thrown all this away.

We have entered an age of insecurity - economic insecurity, physical insecurity, political insecurity.

They'd only been here for a couple of years, only employed twenty people all told, their two-year tax holiday was ending. Place

The time has arrived when patience becomes a crime and mayhem appears garbed in a manner of virtue

It was a skill useful to lawyers, and no man in all English history was more the lawyer than Coke. He personified a profession considered both so influential and so dubious that in 1372 the House of...

The color of your dress really brings out the extraordinary paleness of your skin tone. Are you unwell? Dying, perhaps?

He who does not work does not eat, certainly, but he who works no longer lives.

no one bothered dressing up in priests' robes, for even in chaos hierarchy rules and their cloth wasn't rich enough.

If a person who constantly reads is labeled a bookworm, then I was quickly becoming a tapeworm.

This bothers me because I see it as a lack of diversity in our conception of what kinds of things people should do.

One more thing about Cassandra: in the most famous version of the myth, the disbelief with which her prophecies were met was the result of a curse placed on her by Apollo when she refused to have sex...

A book has been taken. A book has been taken? You summoned the Watch, because someone's taken a book? You think that's worse than murder? The Librarian gave him the kind of look other people would...

Men bow before the power of genius; they hate it, and try to slander it, because genius does not divide the spoil; but if genius persists, they bow before it.

Ghastek, why haven't you married? I asked. He gave me a thin-lipped smile. Because if I were to get married, I would want to have a family. To me, marriage means children. So what's the problem?...

Freedom was a word that everyone mentioned but none of us knew.

A society where you're not allowed to blow your own trumpet is so much more nuanced, sophisticated and interesting than the grim world of literalism that's being ushered in.

Thus it is that the Internet, once heralded as an exciting new medium of communication, is now little more than a vast mail-order catalogue.

Oh, Anna said. She was not a political creature. She felt that politics was the second most evil thing humanity had ever invented, just after lutefisk.

And I also realized that crime only strengthens the rules it tries to break. Nothing establishes a norm as a deviation from it.

Popeye the Sailor Man has more cultural longevity. Only women and gays read or write now. Otherwise, these days, no sooner has someone been sodomised by a close relative than they think they can write...

No one in their right mind would attempt to salvage it, but there were plenty of people not in their right mind. The world was full of them, more produced every minute.

It's okay to be eccentric if you're rich; otherwise you're just crazy.

The new positive theology no longer dedicates itself to making blunt value judgments or telling heartbreaking stories of suffering and redemption: what is now offered in mega-churches {and in many...

I eat not because I want to, not because I have to overcome anything, not to prove myself to anyone, but because it's there. I eat because that's what people do. And somehow when the food is put in...