The lieutenant took his time scanning their visa chips, letting them wait in the drizzle, occasionally making… — Dan Simmons

In such seconds of decision entire futures are made.

There is something about raising a child that helps to sharpen one’s sense of what is real.

Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.