“She would be the darling of the masses for years to come.”

“She would not shed a tear, she would not waste the rest of her years simmering in the maggot broth of memory.”

“The annual Sexpo exhibition comes but once a year, and is not always memorable but this year one of our scouts discovered a truly unique talent at the show - a man who paints portraits with his, errm, manhood. Yes, Pricasso, as he calls himself, took Darling Harbour by storm last week.”

“She told me once that the year she went to England she painted her buttons yellow so she would remember what the sun felt like.”

“Her early years were very unhappy, and she decided she would have a good time if she ever got a chance. Later on, she overdid it a little.”

“Laila (at fourteen years): What would your mother say when she saw you smoke?”

“The vast applause shall reach the starry frame,
No years, no ages shall obscure thy fame,
And Earth's last ends shall hear thy darling name.”
Gratantes plausu excipient: tua gloria coelo Succedet, nomenque tuum sinus ultimus orbis Audiet, ac nullo diffusum abolebitur aevo.

“We would be deceiving both ourselves and the people if we concealed from the masses the necessity of a desperate, bloody war of extermination, as the immediate task of the coming revolutionary action.”

“When Cassie Fowler awoke, she was less shocked to discover that an afterlife existed than to find that she, of all people, had been admitted to it. Her entire adulthood, it seemed, year after year of spiting the Almighty and saluting the Enlightenment, had come to nothing. She’d been saved, raptured, immortalized. Shit. The situation spoke badly of her and worse of eternity. What heaven worthy of the name would accept so ardent an unbeliever as she?”

“He had no picture of her. She would be a memory that would fade as her warmth would fade, but would fade over the years, and he would forget the passion that gave life to this face.”