“Cleaning, like seduction, should be done from the top down — starting with the ceiling, which is ridiculous. Gravity takes care of that.”

“People are always saying: They'll take care of it. They who? It starts with us. It's us. Or else it'll never be done”

“If your ceiling should fall down, then you have lost a room, but gained a courtyard. Think of it that way.”

“Power is like matter, it has gravity, it clumps and then starts to draw more into itself.”

“The idea of the feudal system is that the people on the top take care of the needs of those on the bottom, but I have seldom seen it work that way," Wicked said.
"Yeah," I said, "it's like trickle-down economics; it only works if the people at the top are really good, decent people. The system is only as good as the people in power.”

“Written history, like the missionary position, is an act executed from the top looking down.”

“It is basically a bad idea to take some area of human thought and experience that has been the locus of careful analyses and subtle distinctions for centuries, and start again, as it were, from scratch. What in fact happens when this is done is that some ideas from that tradition re-emerge, but are isolated from the context in which they were embedded in the preceding conversation.”

“I should have told you from the start. I will let you down.”

“My career is one of the few that started at the absolute top and then worked its way down. That was lonely.”

“Madness, as you know, is like gravity, all it takes is a little push.”