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On an autumn afternoon of 1919 a hatless man, with a slight limp, might have been observed ascending the gentle, broad acclivity of Riceyman Steps, which lead from King's Cross Road up to Riceyman Square, in the great metropolitan industrial district of Clerkenwell.

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

All the same, I called up, if you steal my ghost from me all is over between us forever.

Likely enough, I would not have remained in Gafsa more than a couple of days. For it was my intention to go from England straight down to the oases of the Djerid, Tozeur, and Nefta, a corner of unisia left unexplored during my last visit to that country.

The kids were trying [the toy guns] out for size, making them rattle into action with expert ease. A mini Sarajevo. Had a terrorist slipped a real weapon among them, there would have been utter carnage. This was a truly false world. Anything could be forged, everything could be questioned, and one could not even be sure of remaining the same person from one day to the next.

There are snatches of English, French, German everywhere, but serving almost as decoration -- like colors or sounds -- and surrounded by characters in three non-overlapping alphabets. The net effect is of a hundred and one people speaking a thousand and two languages, none of which they understand.

I was not a revolutionary like the others they wanted to hear from, ... I never had been, ... I had always believed in chipping away at things because it was a strategy that, over time, would drive Goliath himself to a nervous breakdown

[A]ll cultural officers [should] be sent urgent instructions recommending the following: a) that they make sure no concert orchestras use mutes, which deform the optimistic tone of the brass instruments, turning it into a painful wailing sound ; and b) that they use every means at their disposal to dissuade orchestra leaders from using saxophones of any kind, because of their hybrid, cosmopolitan, and decadent timbre

The noise outside sounded like a truck carrying a load of old garbage cans, and the scene might have come straight from one of Paternoster's novels. Out of the early morning mist, one after another, emerged a line of squat monsters [Russian tanks]. messengers of truth. Sitting on top of them in a cluster of automatic rifles ... were adolescents from the land of the bright future.

Nineteen, Comrade Sulc, I said to myself. Not twenty. That may be an important difference. Nineteen years and you still might hang for it. Twenty, and even murder comes under the statute of limitations. Not that I believe in the gallows. But I do believe this was murder.

If [God's] all knowing, He knows we're going to sin -- and then He punishes us for it even though He could easily arrange it so that we wouldn't sin in the first place, since He's all-powerful and all-loving. The way it is now, He comes out looking pretty mean.

He was coming over the pass at Bahia Honda, leaving a second voice message for the sheriff, when he saw a churning spire of black smoke. It was rising on the Gulf side of Big Pine, far from the highway, which meant it wasn't a car crash. Some poor bastard's home was ablaze.

On the hottest day of July, trolling in dead-calm waters near Key West, a tourist named James Mayberry reeled up a human arm. His wife flew to the bow of the boat and tossed her breakfast burritos.

Bouillabaisse is only good because cooked by the French, who, if they cared to try, could produce an excellent and nutritious substitute out of cigar-stumps and empty matchboxes.

I rarely yet saw man,
How wise, how noble, young, how rarely-featured,
But she would spell him backward.

I often read that I am atheistic; I hear people speak of my atheism. Yet these words say nothing to me; for me they have no meaning. I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.

From Columbus, the horizontal civilization -- that of space and quantity -- replaces the vertical civilization of quality. Columbus kills Mediterranean civilization.

The rain rained. It hadn't stopped since Euston. Inside the train it was close, the kind of closeness that makes your fingernails dirty even when all you're doing is sitting there looking out of the blurring windows.

Any man who outgrows the myths of childhood is 99% aware and convinced of his own mortality. But there comes the chilly breath on the nape of the neck, a stirring of the air by the wings of the bleak angel.

Funny how everything horrible or foolish was worse if it was also American. Modern architect -- modern American architect. Woman who never stops talking -- American ditto. Zany comedian. Convert to Buddhism....

When at last he got it off he had come to a roughly cylindrical object wrapped in many thicknesses of purple lavatory paper. After unwinding these, he found himself holding an imitation phallus made out of some plastic material or other with the words TRY THIS ONE, WANKER! written on it with the same large green letters as the outside.

No matter how down-to-earth a man may be, however humdrum his life, deep inside him there is a flame, at times barely a spark, but capable of turning into a blaze. This is what makes it necessary to flee mediocrity, the tediousness of the drab days, all so petty, all alike if only on the words of a tale heard or a book read.

Days before at the motel, I had asked myself, What color is the desert at night? A stupid rhetorical question, yet somehow I felt it held the key to my future, or perhaps not so much my future as my capacity for suffering.

Be scared. You cant help that. But dont be afraid. Aint nothing in the woods going to hurt you if you dont corner it or it dont smell that you are afraid. A bear or a deer has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be.

Yet it was not that Lucas made capital of his white or even his McCaslin blood, but the contrary. It was as if he were not only impervious to that blood, he was indifferent to it. He didn't even have to bother to defy it. He resisted it simply by being the composite of the two races which made him, simply by possessing it.

Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart; the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life.

But Clete's real disdain was directed at a state of mind rather than at individuals. He looked on public displays of charity and morality as the stuff of sideshows. He never trusted people in groups and was convinced that inside every reformer there was a glandular, lascivious, and sweaty creature aching for release.