"Maybe [aliens] have been in our lives a lot longer than we want to admit. People have always seen strange things—elves and fairies—and now we don't. Now we see them, right?"
"The UFOs were nothing more than the collective fantasies of a stressed out society... The world into which UFOs had appeared was one of under-the-desk siren drills against nuclear annihilation. Society had made a new myth, a communal idea of something outside a species apparently intent on dooming itself."
"If I can alter my perception of the reality, I can change the reality itself."
"If you get enough people believing one thing, it's like reality bends itself to allow that to exist."
"Sex is usually cleaner than a blood sacrifice."
"Any relationship that developed power dynamics, where she thought she had the right to dictate someone else's behavior or have him dictate hers, was ended almost immediately. She could not stand the thought of hands on her that presumed she belonged to them."
"They were once fairies and elves. Now they are creatures from beyond the stars because you no longer believe in anything but humans."
"Man created god upon his thoughts to externalize, to give form to his belief to give a reason for what they could do. The gods stole away the energies, let man believe he was ruled rather than that he rules."
"Jasmine had endured enough parochial schooling before middle school to have a residual attachment to the beautiful parts of believing, the certainty of knowing one is loved by something beyond comprehension, but also a niggling fear of those who believed too much in anything they could not touch. Believers were the sort to wave pictures of dead fetuses at her when she went to her gynecologist for a checkup."
"The stars glittered through the atmosphere, and he thought of the distances that light must take to hit his eye at exactly that moment. Without him here, those photons would have been wasted."
"She was not the sort of woman guys settle for. She was the one they lust after and strive for. She was the one who ruins other people's relationships simply by existing, but she will always be surmounted as guys come to realize the virtues of the approachable girl next door. She was, in brief, too pretty to be trusted or had."
"Please do not say magic like you are discussing a bowel movement... Humanity expects the lights, so they are provided."
"enough people disagree with what Jesus is to prevent Him from...from manifesting, as such. And billions don't believe He existed at all. He is a legend, a myth. A Jewish carpenter people ignore while committing acts in His name, even as they call themselves believers."
"You have to surrender yourself to the experience."
"Within you, within all human beings, is a seed of greatness that makes their kind quake with fear."
"We're not mad," he began, meaning he was. He was always a plural when mad, as though grammatically throwing his lot in with her mother gave him the power of her authority."
"She resented a universe that forced her to fabricate cover stories for its more inexplicable vagaries."
"The UFOs were explicable enough, just experimental aircrafts from the airport. Of course the government was not going to tell people what was actually going on. She would not be surprised if the government encouraged the UFO cultists to flock there as the perfect cover, since no one would ever believe them."
"Disbelief is the strongest tool in our arsenal."
"Take it with a whole shaker of salt, a grain won't be close to enough."
"I know for a fact the first UFOs reported in modern times, just before the crash at Roswell, were boomerang shaped and were reported as 'flying saucers' to describe the motion of their flight, like a saucer skipping over water. Yet immediately after, people saw and photographed saucer-shaped objects. Boomerang-shaped objects were rarely seen. Now people mostly report seeing large triangles instead of discs or boomerangs, because that is what they are told to expect to see."
"But aliens? There are TV shows about them. There are books and movies and more. The media indoctrinates you to them until people are so desensitized they don't flinch at seeing aliens on TV or having their children buy plastic versions for a quarter."
"It was as though he had secrets, and he wanted you to know he would keep them for the pleasure of depriving you of their taste."
"Were genuine aliens to find us… the chances were fairly good they would appear in a form beyond reckoning, shaped by the requirements of their environment. It was only for the convenience of the costume department of Star Trek that people believed in humanoid aliens."
"I don't think I'm being harassed by little green stalkers. I don't know what's really going on, but I'd rather try to eliminate all rational excuses before blaming intergalactic monkeys from the fourth dimension who are somehow interested in this really boring town."