Quotes from Rich Horton

Some of the monkeys are crowded around the computer watching kitten videos on a pirated wireless connection.

Sometimes sadness teaches lessons that lead to more sadness, but sometimes it can lead to changed behavior. Sometimes happiness cannot figure out how to give itself to others. Sometimes joy can only be lived, a lucky chance that one takes, a risk that says damn the consequences.

Caught-heart, always present, never here, the outlandish and unsatisfying, while always promising satisfaction never-failed-or-fulfilled-quest.

Imulai Mokarengen has four great archives, one for each compass point. The greatest of them is the South Archive, with its windows the color of regret and walls where vines trace out spirals like those of particles in cloud chambers.

He didn't sit. He rarely sat. Big hands massaging the back of his chair, he looked as if he was keeping the furniture from jumping off the floor. The smile enjoyed itself for another moment while smart eyes read every face. Then he decided that things weren't stirred up enough, so with a big voice accustomed to commanding billions of dollars, he told all of us, "I'll be dead before New Year's.

Politics was for those who had too much to eat.

Beyond the towers of Antigen Bay, the other floating cities of the Moveable Feast mingled in sunset glamor.

Because the ice cream would be a coup d'état, in one fell swoop staking her social territory, plastering her brand across gossip sites, and launching the battleship of her marriage,

Hand-wringing parents don't want their precious offspring looking at wieners and hoo-hahs when they're supposed to be amassing student debt, so they demand that the Termite Mound fix the problem by Doing Something.

I would miss him. He always made so little sense.

I'm convinced that no normal human being ever woke up one morning and said, "Dammit, my life doesn't have enough petty bureaucratic rules, zero-tolerance policies, censorship, and fear in it. How do I fix that?

I did not demand that the crows be like me, that their minds resemble my own: I simply cared for them. Why should I base my level of care and concern for them on how much like me they were, rather than loving them for what they were? That I should love only those that resembled myself, and neglect those who lived in other worlds, going about their other lives, seemed absurd to me. Arrogant. I cared for all.

When I was in Outremer, I got shot in the face with an arrow. Should've killed me instantly; but by some miracle it hung up in my cheekbone, and an enemy doctor we'd captured the day before yanked it out with a pair of tongs. You should be dead, they said to me, like I'd deliberately cheated. No moral fibre.

That seemed dangerous. If your internal map of reality doesn't match external conditions, bad things happen.

Realgar was an orange pigment made out of arsenic that they stopped using because it was toxic. Vermilion was made of mercury, verdigris from a toxic copper compound. Ivory black was burned ivory, India yellow came from the urine of cows fed mango leaves, which, from what the kid could dig up, was bad for them. Smalt was just a blue that was hard to make.