"He stood in the street. There was nothing to do. He hadn't realized this could happen to him. The moment was empty of urgency and purpose. He hadn't planned on this. Where was the life he'd always led? There was nowhere he wanted to go, nothing to think about, no one waiting. How could he take a step in any direction if all directions were the same?"

"World is supposed to mean something that's self-contained. But nothing is self-contained. Everything enters something else."

"I have become an enigma to myself. So said Saint Augustine. And herein lies my sickness."

"Computer power eliminates doubt. All doubt rises from past experience. But the past is disappearing. We used to know the past but not the future. This is changing."

"Money makes time. It used to be the other way around. Clock time accelerated the rise of capitalism. People stopped thinking about eternity. They began to concentrate on hours, measurable hours, man-hours, using labor more efficiently."

"A poem bared the moment to things he was not normally prepared to notice."

"When he died he would not end. The world would end."

"To know and not to act is not to know."

"People think about who they are in the stillest hour of the night. I carry this thought, the child's mystery and terror of this thought, I feel this immensity in my soul every second of my life."

"There was something about the noise that he did not choose to wish away. It was the tone of some fundamental ache, a lament so old it sounded aboriginal."

"You know what anarchists have always believed....The urge to destroy is a creative urge...This is also the hallmark of capitalist thought. Enforced destruction. Old industries have to be harshly eliminated. New markets have to be forcibly claimed. Old markets have to be re-exploited. Destroy the past, make the future."

"But whatever the sundry facts, I'm not so different from you in your inner life in the sense that we're all uncontrollable."

"I can see the scornful humor and pity in what I do sometimes. And I can almost enjoy it on the level of being helpless."

"You know what capitalism produces. According to Marx and Engels."

"[This] was releasing [him] from the influence of his neocortex. He felt even freer than usual, attuned to the registers of his lower brain and gaining distance from the need to take inspired action, make original judgments, maintain independent principles and convictions, all the reasons why people are fucked up and birds and rats are not."

"A rat became the unit of currency."

"If you ever know a man who tries to drown his sorrows, kindly inform him his sorrows know how to swim."

"Being in love is a very strange thing. Your thoughts constantly drift towards this other person, no matter what you're doing...And on top of this constant dream state you're in, your stomach feels like it's connected to a bungee cord, and it bounces and bounces until it finally lodges itself next to your heart."

"Strength, confidence, humility, love. Hector Ricardo's four tenets of a happy life."

"Are you truly penitent for your sins?” One more, Murphy whispered. I have wished for death, father. I have prayed nd prayed I would die and could rejoin my wife and son. I can’t be penitent for that, father; I can’t. It’s all I have left.”"

"With wide marble floors and high ceilings, ornate stonework and graceful columns, the buildings on Capitol Hill always made her think of the ancient Roman republic and its timeless institutions—timeless until, after hundreds of years, it lost its checks and balances and the republic became a sham."

"I’ll be damned if I’ll see Americans arrested because they have the wrong political opinion. Spits in the face of everything we are."

"Sir, she tried one last time. You have to at least consider some of this. People are going to die.” He [the President] looked her in the eyes. “No,” he said. I don’t. Have a nice afternoon."

"I would never betray my country, Ken.” “Neither would I, Tommy. The country we grew up with is gone. You’re just like the guys in the Wehrmacht eighty years ago, defending the fatherland when the real enemy was behind them, giving the orders."

"Was it worth it? All this? The dead troops? The war? I don’t know. It all depends on whether or not our country wakes up. If it can somehow turn us away from being a police state, then yes, it was worth it. Some things are worth fighting for."

"When he thought of her dying alone, he wanted to howl. We were supposed to grow old together, he thought. Now I’ve grown old without you."

"I hope, therefore I am."

"Being dead isn't all sitting around in remorseful reflection and bitter self-recrimination. Death, like life, is what you make of it."

"Why is it that I occur as a story to everyone except myself?"

"The truth is you stay in Hell until you forgive yourself."

"To prove that I exist I must kill you....If you are, in fact, my continuing author, then killing you will end my existence as well. Small loss. Such a life, as your puppet, is not worth living. But if I destroy you and your dreck script, and I still exist....then my existence will be glorious, for I will become my own master."

"Like so many experiences you venture into knowing full well that they'll be terrible, in fact the core pleasure resides in their very innate badness,..."

""In Hell, it's our attachments to a fixed identity that torture us."0"

"I do hereby and forever abandon abandoning all hope. Honestly, I give up on giving up. I'm just not cut out to be some hopeless, disillusioned wretch with no aspirations for the rest of the eternity, sprawled catatonic in my own feces on a cold stone floor. In all probability the Human Genome Project will, someday, find that I carry some recessive gene for optimism, because despite all my best efforts I still can't scrape together even a couple of days of hopelessness. Future scientists would call it Pollyanna Syndrome, and if forced to guess, I'd say that mine has been a way-long case of history chasing rainbows."

"Yes, and I know that when a super-sexy older girl with hips and breasts and nice hair wants to take off your glasses and to paint you a smokey eye she's merely trying to enroll you in a beauty contest she's already won. It's the kind of slummy, condescending gesture, like when rich people ask poor people where they summer. To me, this smacks of a blatant, insensitive 'let them eat cake' type of chauvinism."

"[I]f you ask me, most people have children just as their own enthusiasm about life begins to wane. A child allows us to revisit the excitement we once felt about, well...everything. A generation later, our grandkids bump up our enthusiasm yet again. Reproducing is a kind of booster shot to keep us loving life."

"In Hell you'd be foolish to count on people displaying high standards of honesty. The same goes for earth."

"If the living are haunted by the dead, then the dead are haunted by their own mistakes.""

"It simply makes sense that I should miss my parents more than they miss me, especially when you consider that they only loved me for thirteen years while I loved them my entire life."

"No one is discriminated against more than alive people discriminate against the dead. Nobody is as badly marginalized. If the dead are portrayed in popular culture it's as zombies...vampires...ghosts, always something threatening to the living."

"Old habits die hard."

"What do I think I am? In a thousand words....I don't have a clue, but I'll start by abandoning hope. Please help me, Satan. That would make me so happy. Help me give up my addiction to hope."

"What makes earth feel like Hell is our expectation that it should feel like Heaven."

"If you can watch much television, then being dead will a cinch. Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead."

"The first time we meet another person an insidious little voice in our head says, 'I might wear eyeglasses or be chunky around the hips or a girl, but at least I'm not Gay or Black or a Jew.' Meaning: I may be me - but at least I have the good sense not to be YOU."

"No, it's not fair, but what makes life feel like Hell is our expectation that it should last forever. Life is short. Dead is forever. You will find out for yourself soon enough. It won't help the situation for you to get all upset."

""A woman eats to feed her pussy." Meaning: Anything we do to excess is in compensation for not getting a minimum amount of sexual gratification....Men overimbibe alcohol because their penises are thirsty."

"Gunters who wanted help joined a clan, and Aech and I both agreed that clans were for suck-asses and poseurs."