Nightmare in paradise. Or what could have been paradise if so many human beings did not insist on make in a hell of it. - Philip José Farmer

How strange and unforeseeable! The world had been saved, not by great rulers and statesmen, not by mystics and saints and prophets and messiahs, not by any of the holy scriptures, but by an introverted eccentric writer of mathematical texts and children's books and by the child who'd inspired him. The little girl become a woman, dream-ridden Alice, had inspired the nonsense not really nonsense, and this in circuitous and spiraling fashion had inspired her to do what all others had failed to do, to save eighteen billion souls and the world.

as if it were a gear tooth meshed with the cog of another man’s dream and rotated into and then out of his dream.

Sometimes I regret we are forbidden any violence whatsoever. Right now, I would like to kick you in the ass.