The Bat—they called him the Bat.[…]. He'd never been in stir, the bulls had never mugged him, he didn't run with a mob, he played a lone hand, and fenced his stuff so that even the Fence couldn't swear he knew his face.

When someone asks an off-topic question […] they are usually quickly told to knock it off. You can't ask a question about modems in an echo devoted to local-area networks.

The blonde whispered something into the ear of her almost transfixed companion, and they rose—he none too steadily, she with a faintly triumphant but gleeless smile.

‘Children crawled over each other like little grey worms in the gutters,’ he said. ‘The only red things about them were their buttocks and they were raw. Their faces looked as if snails had slimed on them and their mothers were like great sick beasts whose byres had never been cleared. […]’