“All across the country, people felt it was the wrong thing. All across the country, people felt it was the right thing. All across the country, people felt they'd really lost. All across the countr...”

“Words are themselves organisms, ...”

“This isnt fiction, the man says. This is the Post Office.”

“Always be reading something, he said. Even when we're not physically reading. How else will we read the world? Think of it as a constant.”

“But, of course, memory and responsibility are strangers. They're foreign to each other. Memory always goes its own way quite regardless.”

“Is there any escaping the junkshop of the self?”

“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked high...”

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”

“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and...”