courage is the highest quality for a soldier, but technology is a fine substitute.

He did not mention his insomnia: not even to his best friend, Pithecanthropus, and certainly not to Mrs. Comb, who was sure to prescribe a curative bitterer than the complaint.

Endings are simple, but every beginning is made by the beginning before. The one I shall choose is a night in the rainy season nine years ago.

Now I understand what fuels dronehood. This: you work or you drown in debt and the underclass. Tokyo turns you into a bank balance with a carcass in tow. The size of this single number dictates where the carcass may live, what it drives, how it dresses, who it sucks up to, who it may date and marry, whether it cleans itself in a gutter or a

damage. Not

“You know, we are all of us writers, busy writing our own fictions about how the world is, and how it came to be this way. We concoct plots and ascribe motives that may, or may not, coincide with the truth.”

A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it.

I wonder how I would have fared in the war. Could I have calmly stayed in an iron whale cruising toward my death? I am the same age as my great-uncle when he died. I guess I would not have been “I.” I would have been another “I.” A weird thought, that—I am not made by me, or my parents, but by the Japan that did come into being. Subaru Tsukiyama

Voorman laughs until his bed squeaks. “I rendered an entire country nonexistent, Doctor! What more evidence do you need?” “Then what is God doing straitjacketed in the PanOpticon?” Voorman yawns in a well-fed way. “Honolulu gets boring, Doctor. Golf is tedious when you can guarantee holes-in-one. Existence starts to drag. I put myself into prison