Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye. - William Gibson

His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it.

There are no backwaters where things can breed — our connectivity is so high and so global that there are no more Seattles and no more Haight-Ashburys. We’ve arrived at a level of commodification that may have negated the concept of counterculture.

If you knew enough Greek, she thought, you could assemble a word that meant divination via the pattern of grease left on a paper plate by broasted potatoes. But it would be a long word.