Arm of the Sphinx (The Books of Babel, #2)

by Josiah Bancroft

The difficulty with a disguise is that it must be worn for some time before it hangs credibly upon the shoulders. But if worn for too long, a costume becomes comfortable, natural. A man always in disguise must take care lest he become the disguise.

“You didn’t say anything about powder before,” DeFord said. “That was before you complained about my generosity,” Mudd said.

As often as not, as soon as a captain became the subject of a song or a limerick, he was welcomed to immortality with a mortal wound.

If mankind ever attempts to colonize the islands of the stars, we should crew the ships with children and put the youngest at the wheel.

Trust is a muscle that works best in reflex.

History is a love letter to tyrants written in the blood of the overrun, the forgotten, the expunged!”

The real has been erased. Whole eras have been added and removed. Wars have been aggrandized and human struggle relegated to the margins. Villains are re-dressed as heroes. Generous, striving, imperfect

men and women have been stripped of their flaws or plucked of their virtues and turned into figurines of morality or depravity.

Suffering has been recast as nobl...

We are, each of us, a multitude. I am not the man I was this morning, nor the man of yesterday. I am a throng of myself queued through time. We are, gentle reader, each a crowd within a crowd.

Senlin made it through the first chapter before concluding the book was an intellectual spittoon overflowing with dribble.

Civilization first came into being when two of our ancestors knocked together at the mouth of a cave, and one brute or the other uttered the immortal phrase: “No, no, I insist, after you.”

It had been such a happy and absorbing little chore. These arms were nothing like the thick-barreled, graceless pieces she’d used all her life. These guns were like a lady’s fingernails: painted, manicured, and fine. After she prepared each one, she stuck it in her chain belt where it hung like jewelry. For a moment she forgot her hunger and weariness. She felt like strutting around. For the first time in memory, she wished for a mirror.

The spider-eater was quite unimpressed by Adam’s epiphanies.

The man or woman who is rarely lost rarely discovers anything new.

“He looks like a spoon.”

Routine is rather like the egg whites in a batter: It imparts little flavor, but it holds everything together.

The tradition among libraries of boasting about the number of volumes in their collection is well established, but surely, it is not aggregation that makes a library; it is dissemination.

Yes, it is somewhat vexing to thread through the stacks of a library, only to discover an absence rather than the sought-after volume, but once the ire subsides, doesn’t one feel a sense of community?

The gaps in a library are like footprints in the sand: They show us where others have gone before; they assure us we are not alone.

Ah, this is the devil of writing in ink! A pencil allows one to speculate and retract, to play a card and then renege. But ink immortalizes gestures and moods and muttered truths.

These works are the very soul of mediocrity. It seems appropriate that I squirm among them.

If books are traps, then let them be like terrariums: sealed-up and still-living miniatures of the world.

The essential lesson of the zoetrope is this: Movement, indeed all progress, even the passage of time, is an illusion. Life is the repetition of stillness.

it was a common pastoral scene: the country laborer romanticized for the urban landlord.

When humanity ceases to aspire, it begins to decline. Do you know why the status quo is so tyrannical and nauseating? Because it does not exist! There is no stasis in the world, and certainly not where humans are involved. The status quo is just a pleasing synonym for decay.

Do not allow small people to make large impressions. Do not fritter your beauty upon mirrors. Do not make wishes, for wishes only curse the life you have. Never forget, you stand at the end of a long line of short lives.