So, you're one of the dreamers now, Robert. You've beheld the fata morgana of the terminal lagoon. You look tired. Was it a deep one ?

Everywhere, the silt encroached, shoring itself in huge banks against a railway viaduct or crescent of offices, oozing through a submerged arcade like the fetid contents of some latter-day Cloaca Maxima. Many of the smaller lakes were now filled with the silt, yellow disks of fungus-covered sludge from which a profuse tangle of competing plant forms emerged, walled gardens in an insane Eden.

His mother and father were agnostics, and Jim respected devout Christians in the same way that he respected people who were members of the Graf Zeppelin Club or shopped at the Chinese department stores, for their mastery of an exotic foreign ritual. Besides, those who worked hardest for others, like Mrs. Philips and Mrs. Gilmour and Dr. Ransome, often held beliefs that turned out to be correct.

Prosperous suburbia was one of the end-states of history. Once achieved, only plague, flood, or nuclear war could threaten its grip.

From sandwich to summer school, they were the symbols of subservience and the enemies of freedom.

Idealists can be quite a problem when they get disgusted with themselves.

I am looking into a silent world.

On the morning after the storm the body of a drowned giant was washed ashore on the beach five miles to the north-west of the city.

When Armageddon takes place, parking is going to be a major problem.

Not for the first time Laing reflected that he and his neighbors were eager for trouble as the most effective means of enlarging their sex lives.