Quotations

According to Fertility Hollis, there is no chaos.

There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns.

When their fuel runs out, ... stars collapse dramatically in upon themselves, and as they do so, enormous amounts of gravitational energy are released and converted into heat.

The night before I left home, my big brother told me everything he knew about the outside world.

In the outside world, he said, women had the power to change the color of their hair. And their eyes. And their lips.

To calm this girl down, to get her to listen, I tell her the story about my fish. This is fish number six-hundred and forty-one in a lifetime of goldfish.

For the first time I noticed – as I would notice repeatedly during my ordeal, between one throe of agony and the next – that my suffering was taking place in a grand setting.

The day had gone by just as days go by. I had killed it in accordance with my primitive and retiring way of life. I had worked for an hour or two and perused the pages of old books. I had had pains for two hours, as elderly people do.

... “Oh, well – he wasn’t going to write Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony anyway.”

It’s a funny thing about the modern world. You hear girls in the toilets of clubs saying, ‘Yeah he fucked off and left me. He didn’t love me. He just couldn’t deal with love.

You stand there, braced. Cloud shadows race over the buff rock stacks as a projected film, casting a queasy, mottled ground rash. The air hisses and it is no local breeze but the great harsh sweep of wind from the turning of the earth.