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“Not even by painting my window with colourful dreams can I block out the noise of the life outside, oblivious to my gazing at it.”

“…'why is it that these desperate socialists and communists are at the same time so unbelievably stingy, so interested in acquiring things, so devoted to private property, and even to the point that the more a man is a socialist, the deeper he's into it, the stronger his property instincts…”

“The strategy however was to dial a dozen other things up to full volume as well, so that the airwaves canceled each other out, and the cacophony in her head reached such a saturated state it approximated silence.”

“She was drained already. Scripts were all she had now, and they were enough to keep her walking, but not enough for her heart to start beating.”

“Professors, who saw dozens of hopeful faces over the course of a day, forgot always that they were their students' entire universe.”

“He loved numbers because they behaved the way they were supposed to, because the rules never changed. The square root of sixty-four never ceased to be eight.”

“She knew very well where the sun shone, and yet was bound by impulse to bury herself in the dark.”

“Believe the lie— trust the lie—it is the only thing you have. Stay in the cage and paint the walls. If you do not, then you must quit; but if you can delude yourself long enough, then your delusions might very well come true.”

“But all this was a fairy tale. In relentlessly enforcing the glamour, she had closed off her other options. And now she was left in a trap she had constructed for herself.”

“She thought she'd learned to inhabit the impossible ideal: the girl who was eminently fuckable but unreachable, and therefore virtuous and perfect.”

“Never malicious. Only careless. Only a man whose mind was larger than the rest, a genius burdened with purpose, who couldn't spare attention for the damage he left in his wake”

“‘The upshot is, Hell's not so bad for the people who are in it. They're exactly where they wanted to be.’”

“The whole system could be broken, and it wouldn't matter. They’d put up with anything, only for the promise of access to that abstract plane.”

“How could she explain to him the way her mind felt as if it were chewing, digesting difficult concepts?”

“Wickedness felt better when you had a coconspirator; otherwise it was just you and your conscience.”

“It always went like this—it didn't matter what she intended, it all went to shit anyway because she was so stupid, worthless, she could not stop falling apart, she could not hold the thoughts inside, she made all the wrong choices and it hurt everyone around her.”

“And if you could constantly reinvent yourself, cut away the parts of you that ashamed or hurt you, then how could you ever come to really know someone else? Were people all just living paradoxes, keeping up an illusion just long enough to survive contact with others? Were people then all a series of lies in the end?”

“And if falling in love was discovery, was letting yourself be discovered the equivalent to being loved?”

“So she might be forgiven if, once upon a time, she had even once deluded herself into thinking she had risen to deserve space in Peter's inner world.”

“When it came down to it, magick was not really about how much complicated maths or logic or linguistics you had. Rather, the final push to make a spell work was just the power of belief. It wasn't about the algorithms at all, it was about self-deception. You had to assemble enough proof to convince yourself the world could be another way, and as long as you could trick yourself, then you could trick the world.”

On the other hand, he was very good at maths, and she really didn't know this stuff, and competence was always attractive.”

“Is Hell one great metaphysical manifestation of the Golden Rule?”