"You're going to engineer a bunch of prehistoric animals and set them on an island? Fine. A lovely dream. Charming. But it won't go as planned. It is inherently unpredictable, just as the weather is."

"Increasingly, the mathematics will demand the courage to face its implications."

"System Recovery may prove impossible."

"Do the things that scare you the most."

"Nothing of you is all-the-way yours. All of you is inherited."

"You can only hold a smile for so long, after that it's just teeth."

"No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all."

"The only reason why we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own weekend."

"The truth is, being ugly isn't the thrill you'd think, but it can be an opportunity for something better than I ever imagined."

"Go figure, but Texans seem to be a lot more comfortable around disastrous house fires than they are around anal sex."

"That's what I love about fire, how it would kill me as quick as anybody else. How it can't know I'm its mother. It's so beautiful and powerful and beyond feeling anything for anybody, that's what I love about fire."

"Everybody here thinks the whole story is about them. Definitely that goes for everybody in the world."

"Mostly what I hate about Evie is the fact that she's so vain and stupid and needy. But what I hate most is how she's just like me. What I really hate is me so I hate pretty much everybody."

"All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring."

"When you don't share your problems, you resent hearing the problems of other people."

"Your birth is a mistake you'll spend your whole life trying to correct."

"A sexual reassignment surgery is a miracle for some people, but if you don't want it, it's the ultimate form of self-mutilation."

"It's because we're so trapped in our culture, in the being of being human on this planet with the brains we have, and the"

"Our real discoveries come from chaos."

"[W]e're so trained to do life the right way. To not make mistakes" Brandy says, "I figure, the bigger the mistake looks, the better chance I'll have to break out and live a real life."

"Evie starts telling me about an idea she has for a remake of Cinderella, only instead of the little birds and animals making her a dress, they do cosmetic surgery. Bluebirds give her a facelift. Squirrels give her implants. Snakes, liposuction. Plus, Cinderella starts out as a lonely little boy."

"Las Vegas looks the way you'd imagine heaven must look at night."

"The best way is not to fight it, just go. Don't be trying all the time to fix things. What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger."

"And if you can find any way out of our culture, then that's a trap too. Just wanting to get out of the trap reinforces the trap."

"The world," Brandy says, "is your cradle and your trap."

"Whatever you're thinking, a million other folks are thinking. whatever you do, they're doing, and none of you is responsible. All of you is a cooperative effort."

"The same way a compact disk isn't responsible for what's recorded on it, that's how we are. You're about as free to act as a programmed computer. You're about as one-of-a-kind as a dollar bill."

"The nurse brings me the personal classified ads from a newsletter. Sister Katherine peers down her nose and through the glasses to read: Guys seeking slim, adventurous girls for fun and romance. And, yes, it's true, not one single guy specifically excludes hideous mutilated girls with growing medical bills."

"Sometimes the best way to deal with shit, she says, is to not hold yourself as such a precious little prize."

"Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them."

"You see, I can handle the baby food and the not talking and being homeless and invisible, but I have to know that I can love somebody. Completely and totally, permanently and without hope of reward, just as an act of will, I will love somebody."

"I wanted to give up the idea I had any control. Shake things up. To be saved by chaos. To see if I could cope, I wanted to force myself to grow again. To explode my comfort zone."

"The truth is I was addicted to being beautiful, and that's not something you just walk away from. Being addicted to all that attention, I had to quit cold turkey."

"People all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future."

"What I need to do is fuck up so bad I can't save myself."

"A Million fucking fashion makeovers that only leave me trapped being me."

"It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't love."

"Don't do what you want. Do what you don't want. Do what you're trained not to want. Do the things that scare you the most."

"You're safe because you're trapped inside your culture."

"If I can't be beautiful, I want to be invisible."

"It's not living alone if you keep a rifle under your bed."

"How is it you can keep mutating and still be the same deadly virus?"

"We'll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create."

"Only when we eat up this planet will God give us another."

"The future is just wasted on some people."

"The wild daisies and Indian paintbrush are just the genitals of a different life form."

"All around us, erosion and insects are just chewing up the world, never mind people and pollution. Everything biodegrades with or without you pushing."

"Ancient aboriginal petroglyphs and junk are just whizzing past"

"Don't you think that somehow television makes us God?"

"She'd wear shades of lipstick you'd expect to see around of the base of a penis."