The Drawing of the Dark (1979)
- All page numbers from the trade paperback edition published in 1999 by Del Rey Books
- It struck Duffy that a touch of hysteria had sharpened the good fellowship tonight, as if the night wind whistling under the eaves carried some pollen of impermanence, making everyone nostalgic for things they hadn’t yet lost.
- Chapter 6 (p. 86)
- He felt as if someone far away below in the darkness was chipping away at the pillars of his mind, and the steady crack...crack...crack of it was the only sound in the universe.
- Chapter 9 (p. 129)
- The wages of courage is death, lad, but it’s the wages of everything else, too.
- Chapter 10 (p. 140)
- You’re still Brian Duffy. As much as you ever were. But you’re Arthur, too, and that kind of outshines everything else. Brandy and water tastes more like brandy than water, after all.
- Chapter 13 (p. 178)
- Trusting Merlin is like giving a migrant scorpion a lift inside your hat.
- Chapter 14 (p. 183)
- “How old are you, Brian? You ought to know by now that something always breaks up love affairs unless both parties are willing to compromise themselves. And that compromising is harder to do the older and less flexible and more independent you are. It just isn’t in you, Brian. You could no more get married now than you could become a priest, or a sculptor, or a greengrocer.”
Duffy opened his mouth to voice angry denials, then one corner turned up and he closed it. “Damn you,” he said wryly. “Then why do I want to, half the time?”
Aurelianus shrugged. “It’s the nature of the species. There’s a part of a man’s mind that can only relax and go to sleep when he’s with a woman, and that part gets tired of always being tensely awake. It gives orders in so loud a voice that it often drowns out the other components. But when the loud one is asleep at last, the others regain control and chart a new course.” He grinned. “No equilibrium is possible. If you don’t want to put up with the constant seesawing, you must either starve the logical components or bind, gag and lock away in a cellar that one insistent one.”
Duffy grimaced and drank some more brandy. “I’m used to the rocking, and I was never one to get motion-sick,” he said. “I’ll stay on the seesaw.”
Aurelianus bowed. “You have that option, sir.”
- Chapter 18 (p. 247)
The Anubis Gates (1983)
- All page numbers from the trade paperback edition published in 1997 by Ace Books
- When they’d gone the old man turned around to watch the sun’s slow descent. The Boat of Millions of Years, he thought; the boat of the dying sungod Ra, tacking down the western sky to the source of the dark river that runs through the underworld from west to east, through the twelve hours of the night, at the far eastern end of which the boat will tomorrow reappear, bearing a once again youthful, newly reignited sun.
Or, he thought bitterly, removed from us by a distance the universe shouldn’t even be able to encompass, it’s a vast motionless globe of burning gas, around which this little ball of a planet rolls like a pellet of dung propelled by a kephera beetle. Take your pick, he told himself as he started slowly down the hill...But be willing to die for your choice.
- Chapter 1 (pp. 3-4)
- Say that again after you’ve been in the same spot and acted differently, old buddy. Maybe then I’ll be ashamed.
- Chapter 7 (pp. 169-170)
- I’ve learned that having a lot of money is more fun than not having a lot of money, and that once you’ve got it, it tends to grow all by itself, like a fire.
- Chapter 14 (p. 341)
- “You ever notice, Joe,” he asked, mechanically picking up the mug, “that it always takes a little more trouble to get something than the thing was really worth?”
Joe considered it. “Better than taking a lot of trouble and getting nothing.”
Dundee sipped the coffee. He didn’t seem to have heard Joe. “There’s so much weariness and fatigue in it all. For every action there is an equal...stupefaction. No, that might be bearable—it’s greater than the action.”
- Chapter 14 (p. 342)
- Certainly no valid answer is ever gained by excluding any factors of the problem; that was the Puritans’ error.
- Chapter 15 (p. 370)
On Stranger Tides (1987)
- All page numbers from the mass market paperback edition published in 2011 by Harper
- The seas and the weathers are what is; your vessels adapt to them or sink.
- Chapter 1 (p. 9, repeated on p. 53)
- “Whats o’clock?”
It wants a quarter to twelve,
And to-morrow's doomsday.
- Chapter 19 (p. 207, quoting T. L. Beddoes)
- All page numbers from the trade paperback edition published in 2003 by Perennial
- It wasn’t fair, but fairness was something you had to go get; it wasn’t delivered like the mail.
- Chapter 8 (p. 77)
- Gambling was the place where statistics and profound human consequences met most nakedly, after all, and cards, even more than dice or the numbers on a roulette wheel, seemed able to define and perhaps even dictate a player’s...luck.
- Chapter 8 (p. 79)
- I'm really willing to try to believe you're not crazy, but you gotta help me a little, you know?
- Chapter 37 (p. 374)
- He thought about crossing his fingers, but clasped her hand instead.
- Epilogue (p. 535)
- All page numbers from the trade paperback edition published in 2013 by William Morrow
- All wrong. The words seemed in this moment to describe Hale’s whole life.
- Chapter 7 (p. 182)
- Your policy here, and in all the Arab states, has been to get out as much oil as you could, before the indigenous peoples looked around and noticed that they were living in the twentieth century.
- Chapter 7 (pp. 184-185)
- Which persepective is true? he thought. Which do I want to be true?
- Chapter 10 (p. 285)
- Your skull in gold will be more valuable than others, being solid all through.
- Chapter 12 (p. 345)
- Let us quickly be finished with the business of dying, to save the trouble of making dinner.
- Chapter 12 (p. 345)
- He remembered his dismay at finding himself committed to a hand of cards without having honestly looked at the stakes, fourteen years ago. Had he been doing it again? But if the stakes were too frightening to consider, and the game was already lost, what value could there be in clear comprehension?
- Chapter 17 (p. 496)