The half moon sailed high, sharp-winged shadows skimming across it, an — Lucius Shepard

"All journeys end in disappointment if for no other reason than that they end."

"Travel has always served to inspire me, as it has many writers, as it apparently did my alter ego; yet the farther we proceeded down the Mekong, the more I came to realize that there was a blighted sameness to the world and its various cultures. Strip away their trappings and you found that every tribe was moved by the same passions, and this was true not only in the present but also, I suspected, in ages past. Erase from your mind the images of the kings and exotic courtesans and maniacal monks that people the legends of Southeast Asia, and look to a patch of ground away from the temples and palaces of Angkor Wat—there you will find the average planetary citizen, a child eating the Khmer equivalent of a Happy Meal and longing for the invention of television."

"Depravity always incorporates obsession."

"She went on to dismiss much of postmodernism as having “an overengineered archness” and, except for a few exemplary authors, being a refuge for those writers whose “disregard for traditional narrative (was) an attempt to disguise either their laziness or their inability to master it.”"

"I yearned for that future. I wanted to live in the illusion that persuades us that true-life experience can be obtained on the Internet."

"Here was a beast for whom there could be no predator. What better definition of God is there than that?"