I'd offer you a drink," he said, "but all I have is the good stuff. - Tim Powers

How does my offer sound?
Rivas took a long thoughtful sip. "Let's see," he said finally. "It sounds insincere, impossible, and definitely, absolutely unattractive.

Sukie had always said that the Alice books were the Old and New Testaments for ghosts—which Pete had never understood; after all, Lewis Carroll hadn’t been dead yet when he’d written them.

He fought to think rationally.
Guilt, he reminded himself, is an electro-chemical event in the physical brain. It’s one of the useless side-effects of consciousness, which is itself irrelevant. The ideal is the lines in Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall:” “Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.” The important thing was that all of it moved in determinate grooves.