"In the early twenty-first century farming had all but died out here. We got our food from the supermarket, and not ev…"

"We lived more by the sun than by the clock, but I did own a clock. It was an eight-day windup console clock which I k…"

"Living by the clock was an old habit that died hard. Not much that we did required punctuality, but people still want…"

"The racket was coming over what used to be our public radio station, WAMC out of Albany, but the familiar... voices..…"

"I switched on the television on the outside chance that something might come through. Nothing had been on for years. …"

"I searched the FM band but there was nothing besides other pious pleaders, and they didn't come in too well. The AM b…"

"It was obvious there would be no return to [what we used to call] "normality." The [resource-intensive] economy would…"

"In a world that had become a salvage operation, the general supply evolved into Union Grove's leading industry. When …"

"We regarded opium as a godsend. It did not develop into an illicit trade, though. There was no legal prohibition, no …"

"I had one of those steel thermal mugs you carried everywhere with you as a kind of signifier of how busy, and therefo…"