""The difference between how you look and how you see yourself is enough to kill most people. And maybe the reason vampires don’t die is because they can never see themselves in photographs or mirrors." p144"

""I used to think the secret to a happy ending was to bring down the curtain at the exact right time. A moment after happiness, then everything's all wrong again." p76"

"Telling a story is how we digest what happens to us," Mr Whittier says, "It's how we digest our lives. Our experiences."

"We love drama. We love conflict. We need a devil or we'll create one."

"If there's a trick to doing a job you hate... Mrs. Clark says it's to find a job you hate even more."

"That's how a scary story works. It echoes some ancient fear. It recreates some forgotten terror. Something we'd like to think we're grown beyond. But it can still scare us to tears. It's something you'd hoped was healed."

"Chapter 19, Absolution"

"We should forgive God..."

"The whole idea of men creating perfect robot women for their own pleasure, it happens every day. The most "beautiful" women you see in public, none of them are for real. They're just men perpetuating their perverted stereotypes of women. Just the oldest story in the world. There's a penis on every page of Cosmopolitan magazine if you know where to look."

"I lost my virginity through my ear."

"With the angel of death going door to door, people stayed together. They quit bitching and behaved."

""What matters," Sister Vigilante says, "is, people need a monster they can believe in." A true horrible enemy. A demon to define themselves against. Otherwise, it's just us versus us."

""Yes, terrible things happen, but sometimes those terrible things- they save you." p205"

"As a fundraiser, our first idea was 'Five Bucks to Punch a Mime.'"

"This is just what human beings do-turn objects into people, people into objects. Back and forth. Tit for tat."

"You can't unfuck a kid. Once you fuck a kid, you can't get that genie back in the bottle."

"For the rest of history, all over the world, people will be trying to save this same dead woman. This woman who just wanted to die."

"Every apostle or disciple," Mrs. Clarke says, "as much as they're running to follow their savior-they're running just as hard to escape something else."

"In the big factory of perfecting human souls, the Earth was a kind of tumbler. The same as the kind people use to polish rocks. All souls come here to rub the sharp edges off each other. All of us, we're meant to be worn smooth by conflict and pain of every kind. To be polished. There was nothing bad about this. This wasn't suffering. It was erosion. It was just another, a basic, an important step in the refining process."

"The earth, he'd say, is just a big machine. A big processing plant. A factory. That's your big answer. The big truth. Think of a rock polisher, one of those drums, goes round and round, rolls twenty-four/seven, full of water and rocks and gravel. Grinding it all up. Round and round. Polishing those ugly rocks into gemstones. That's the earth. Why it goes round. We're the rocks. And what happens to us--the drama and pain and joy and war and sickness and victory and abuse--why, that's just the water and sand to erode us. Grind us down. To polish us up, nice and bright."

"You are permanent, but this life is not," Mr. Whittier would say. "You don't expect to visit an amusement park, then stay forever."

"A journalist has a right... ...and a duty, to destroy the golden calves he helps create."

"Stink for privacy, the new way to protect personal space. Intimidation by odor."

"What you have to love about drinking is, every swallow is an irrevocable decision. You charging ahead, in control of the game. It's the same with pills, sedatives and painkillers, every swallow is a first definite step down some road."

""It's not a matter of right and wrong," Mr. Whittier would say. Really, there is no wrong. Not in our minds. Our own reality. You can never set off to do the wrong thing. You can never say the wrong thing. In your own mind, you are always right. Every action you take--what you do or say or how you choose to appear--is automatically right the moment you act."

"To create a race of masters from a race of slaves, Mr. Whittier said, to teach a controlled group of how to create their own lives, Moses had to be an asshole."

"People in France have a phrase: "Spirit of the Stairway." In French: esprit d'Escalier. It means that moment when you find the answer but it's too late. So you're at a party and someone insults you. You have to say something. So, under pressure, with everybody watching, you say something lame. But the moment you leave the party...As you start down the stairway, then - magic. You come up with the perfect thing you should've said. The perfect crippling put down. That's the Spirit of the Stairway. The trouble is, even the French don't have a phrase for the stupid things you actually do say under pressure. Those stupid, desperate things you actually think or do."

"Everything is funnier in retrospect, funnier and prettier and cooler. You can laugh at anything from far enough away."

"All my friends with PalmPilots and cell phones, they're always calling themselves and leaving reminders to themselves about what's about to happen. We leave Post-it notes for ourselves. We go to that shop in the mall, the one where they engrave whatever shit you want on a silver-plated box or a fountain pen, and we get a reminder for every special event that life goes by too fast for us to remember. We buy those picture frames where you record a message on a sound chip. We videotape everything! Oh, and now there's those digital cameras, so we can all email around our photos — this century's equivalent of the boring vacation slide show. We organize and reorganize. We record and archive."

"The journalist researches a story. The novelist imagines it. What’s funny is, you’d be amazed at the amount of time a novelist has to spend with people in order to create this single lonely voice. This seemingly isolated world. It’s hard to call any of my novels “fiction.”"

"If you haven’t already noticed, all my books are about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with other people. In a way, that is the opposite of the American Dream: to get so rich you can rise above the rabble, all those people on the freeway or, worse, the bus."

"Either an ancient cursed Egyptian mummy has come back to life and is trying to kill the people next door, or they're watching a movie."

""The best way to waste your life is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch."

"This culling poem is a blessing. Why do you think it was created in the first place? It will save millions of people from the slow terrible death we're headed for from disease, from famine, drought, from solar radiation, from war, from all the places we're headed."

"Sticks and stones will break your bones, but now words can kill, too.This is how we must look to God. As if everything's just fine."

"Maybe this is why so many serial killers work in pairs. It's nice not to feel alone in a world full of victims or enemies."

"Imagine immortality, where even a marriage of fifty years would feel like a one-night stand. Imagine seeing trends and fashions blur past you. Imagine the world more crowded and desperate every century. Imagine changing religions, homes, diets, careers, until none of them have any real value.Imagine traveling the world until you're bored with every square inch. Imagine your emotions, your loves and hates and rivalries and victories, played out again and again until life is nothing more than a melo-dramatic soap opera. Until you regard the birth and death of other people with no more emotion than the wilted cut flowers you throw away."

"The more people die, the more things stay the same."

"I need to rebel against myself. It's the opposite of following your bliss. I need to do what I most fear."

"History is is filled with brilliant people who wanted to fix things and just made them worse."

"Maybe you don't go to hell for the things you do. Maybe you go to hell for the things you don't do."

"Every generation wants to be the last. Every generation hates the next trend in music they can't understand. We hate to give up the reins of our culture. To find our own music playing in elevators. The ballad for our revolution, turned into background music for a television commercial. To find our generation's clothes and hair suddenly retro."

"In order to save the world, Jesus Christ suffered for about thirty-six hours on the cross. I am willing to suffer an eternity in hell for the same cause."

"The masochist bullies the sadist into action. The most passive person is actually an aggressor. Every day, just you living means the misery and death of plants and animals- and even some people. "Slaughterhouses, factory farms, sweatshops," she says, "like it or not, that's what your money buys.""

"Still, he deserved to die. He called me an asshole."

"Doctor Sarah didn't start out by attacking and berating everybody who called her radio show," Mona says. "She used to have a little time slot and a little audience, and she seemed to really care about helping people.""

"According to Mona, you shouldn't kill people, because that drives you away from humanity. In order to justify killing, you have to make the victim your enemy. To justify any crime, you have to make the victim your enemy."