Science Fiction is a collection of guerrilla bands each challenging the rights of the others to belong to the centrality. The band most challenged by… - R. A. Lafferty

When we travel we find how greatly our boyhood dreams are outstripped by reality.

I am mistress of all the sciences. I go so far beyond all else that my work is called magic. I manipulate noumena, regarding monads as points of entry tangential to hylomorphism. As to the paradox of Primary Essence being contained in Quiddity, the larger in the smaller, I have my own solution. The difficulty is always in not confusing Contingency with Accidence. Do you understand me?

Rufinus was an orator and a lawyer, a master of civil administration and agenda. It was because of him that the Eastern Empire — Byzantium — became a bureaucracy for a thousand years; and lived on because its administration had become too intricate to die — though there are those who say that its death was concealed in a sea of paper for that one thousand years. The heritage of Rufinus was the first and longest-enduring paper Empire.
It is not accidental that in the tenure of Rufinus as Master of Offices, the duplication of written copies was first brought about. This was not on the order of carbon paper used at the instant of writing; it was wet-process copies made from a finished piece. The process is a detail, however; in the true sense Rufinus was the inventor of carbon copies. Shorthand was then five hundred years old, but Rufinus was the inventor of an improved form of shorthand.
It is believed that certain clerks of his appointing are still shuffling papers at the same desks. The paper world he set up was self-perpetuating.