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

“Under what circumstances do you think you might want to…return to the real world?”
The real world and I never did get along, she thought.
“I can’t imagine,” she said.

“This fruit syrup stuff is no good for smoking; it’s only fit for impressing ignorant girls.”
Tyler shrugged, as if to say that that was reason enough to smoke it right there.

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.