Andrew Fox (author)

"Would it be riding the wave, or stepping over a puddle?"

"Psychologists claim the mind is incapable of imagining itself not existing, of mentally inhabiting its own extinction. Yet I can sense obliteration’s lackeys nibbling away at my edges, hungry mice eating the brown crusts of the bread of my being."

"And so he nattered on, like an old woman fretting over the fraying of her prayer rug, not realizing the ceaseless nervous fidgeting of her fingers was the cause of its fraying."

"Thanks to my work, I know the type all too well. A malcontent, a refusenik. A grievance monger, quick as a scampering lemur to take offense. Such people make little sense to me."

"Please understand, Schisms occur within subcommunities frequently and with relative ease. Mergings of subcommunities, on the other hand, are more like comet sightings… very rare indeed."

"William Shakespeare has one of his characters propose, Let’s kill all the lawyers. He forgot to include the bureaucrats."

"“That’s…that’s a nightmarish scenario. Do you really think people would just… attack one another, as soon as the fences were gone? That they’d throw aside civil society so easily?” “What ‘civil society,” Leah? Your eight million inhabitants have never learned how to exist and thrive in a civil society—all they’ve known are clans, sheltered clans.”"

"I’ve learned pogroms do not require much in the way of organization. Merely ample hate."

"Bureaucracies are dullards’ tools of revenge on men of action. Sputtering machines filled with blinkered human cogs, they respond glacially to signals issued by their political masters, rather like ponderous dinosaurs whose tiny brains required an auxiliary neural center within the hip region to re-transmit commands all the way to their tail."

"People will believe what they want most to believe, what they yearn to be true. Nothing is more readily accepted than the seeming confirmation of an already established prejudice."

"Instead of gathering the lost Sparks of holiness and restoring the unity of mankind and the world, the whole point of our existence has become an ever more rigid purification, a sifting out of dissenting views, the banishment of anything which threatens to challenge our customs and ingrained ways of thinking, or which makes us uncomfortable or uncertain—"

"“The wall will always be there to protect us,” they said. I later came to understand that it is merely a tangible, universally visible symbol of the far more important invisible walls separating the seventy-thousand subcommunities—or is it eighty-thousand now? One day, I firmly believe, there will be as many subcommunities as there are residents in the City."