Two tires fly. Two Wail. A bamboo grove, all chopped down From it, warring songs. - Neal Stephenson

"The biggest machines, in those days, were already pushing the limits of what could be constructed on Arbre with reasonable amounts of money."

"I hadn't known that," I said. "I always tend to assume there's an infinite amount of money out there."

"There might as well be," Arsibalt said, "but most of it gets spent on pornography, sugar water, and bombs. There is only so much that can be scraped together for particle accelerators."

Princess Nell had to reconstruct them, learning the language, which was extremely pithy and made heavy use of parentheses.

In this dream, Dodge was in the small town in Iowa where he had grown up...the grid street pattern of that town was, decades later, the spatial lattice on which virtually all of his dreams were constructed. It was the graph paper on which his mind seemed to need to plot things.