"The recruit was Sam McCain; in one of our lunch sessions I recalled Sarah O’Connell describing him as more mouth than brain. Unsurprisingly, he’d been in sales most of his life."

"You think this because you are a nasty person by nature, Calvin, and you don’t understand nice people. To you, the end of existence is to control things, and so you will never build anything, but rath…"

"There is little doubt that the planetary patina—including ourselves—is autopoietic. Life at the surface of the Earth seems to regulate itself in the face of external perturbation, and does so without …"

"... It’s hard to say whether it was pain or the past that was being extirpated or whether they were the same thing. The doctors who treated her were unlikely to have experienced such profound instabil…"

"Let the suits of the masquers be graceful, and such as become the person, when the vizors are off; not after examples of known attires; Turke, soldiers, mariners', and the like. Let anti-masques not b…"