Plan for Chaos

To sleep in peace, and resume a nightmare when one wakes, is a highly undesirable reversal of the natural order.

"I see death as the worm's opportunity. It is defeat. You can dress it as you like, with drama, or glory, or pomposity, and perhaps deceive yourself for the critical moment - but, nevertheless, the same worm comes - it is defeat..."

It's all pretty simple if you don't give a damn who gets hurt in the rush.

"Dying," observed the doctor, "is such a very ordinary thing to do."

"Was she a bit mad?"

"Mad? Oh, no - unless you would call a failure to grow up a kind of madness - in which case there would be very few sane people."

One man's trash is another's souvenir.

You can half-expect things. Try to face them in advance, case-harden your mind, you think - but when they come, it's always different.

I'd begun to grasp the principle that the less anybody knows, the less any squealer can give away. And it was easy to see that in a place where questioning was liable to assume the aspect of a blood-sport, the less one did know about other people's business, the better.

Primitive man would see every one of us as a magician.

Practically everyone there had had an air of brooding privately with differing intensity. I knew now what it had reminded me of - the outpatients department of a hospital.

There is a sense of reason's fingernails scrabbling to keep their hold, as one slides towards something which is not accountable; not, by ordinary standards, quite sane...

I suppose we all have a number of carefully furnished, non-communicating rooms in our minds.

On the principle that if you walk briskly with an air of purpose ninety-nine per cent of the people you meet will assume it is a proper purpose, I did just that.

"The thing is to play your own game - not let the other feller force you to what he wants."

There is a degree of odds against which a gambler becomes just another mug.