An angel, maybe, Cochran thought, but one with a harpoon rather than a harp. - 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.

Your policy here, and in all the Arab states, has been to get out as much oil as you could, before the indigenous peoples looked around and noticed that they were living in the twentieth century.

It wasn’t fair, but fairness was something you had to go get; it wasn’t delivered like the mail.