“Although I do it all the time, I really hate holding conversations with myself.”

Eiji Yoshikawa, Musashi – Book One: The Way of the Samurai

“…storytelling and narrative lie at the heart of all successful communication.”

Max Whitby, Is Interactive Dead?

“Color can threaten, overwhelm, whirling like that – an ant in a kaleidoscope might sense the problem.”

Peter Matthiessen, At Play in the Fields of the Lord

“… most coincidences were curious.”

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

“But, my dear fellow, if one is not blinded by a sense of indispensability, one must take it that we, like the other lords of creation before us, will one day be replaced. There are two ways in which it can happen: either through ourselves, by our self-destruction, or by the incursion of some species which we lack equipment to subdue.”

John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

“Not all people are smart.”

Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

“Don’t go getting mixed up in the business of your betters, or you’ll land in trouble to big for you.”

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“If you were wishful to challenge the supremacy of a society that was fairly stable, and quite well weaponed, what would you do? Would you meet it on its own terms by launching a probably costly, and certainly destructive, assault? Or, if time were of no great importance, would you prefer to employ a version of a more subtle tactic? Would you, in fact try somehow to introduce a fifth column, to attack it from within?”

John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos

“Cleverness in battle and manly things is accounted a greater virtue than pure strength in warriorship.”

Michael Crichton, The 13th Warrior

“It is because Nature is ruthless, hideous, and cruel beyond belief that it was necessary to invent civilization. One thinks of wild animals as savage, but the fiercest of them begins to look almost domesticated when one considers the viciousness required of a survivor in the sea; as for the insects, their lives are sustained only by intricate processes of fantastic horror. There is no cosiness implied by “Mother Nature”. Each species must strive to survive, and that it will do, by every means in its power, however foul – unless the instinct to survive is weakened by conflict with another instinct.”

John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos