"…she did not believe that the world was a vale of tears but rather a joke that God had played and that it was idiotic to take it seriously if He himself never had."

"Most kids don't give a hoot in hell for brains; they go a penny a pound, and the kid with the high I.Q. Who can't play baseball or at least come in third in the local circle jerk is everybody's fifth wheel."

"A terrified-looking bystander, a nerdy man in a sweater, calls the police and stammers into the phone: 'A huge group of people are fighting and there's pepper spray and superheroes and I don't know."

"A man really writes for an audience of about ten persons. Of course if others like it that is clear gain. But if those ten are satisfied he is content."

"I'm tired of playing worn-out depressing ladies in frayed bathrobes. I'm going to get a new hairdo and look terrific and go back to school and even if nobody notices I'm going to be the most self-fulfilled lady on the block."

"I shuffle along, letting the current pull me, and I have the sense that I am like a rat caught in a maze of tunnels, moving endlessly toward some promise of...Of what? Light? Life? Cheese?"

"The Anglican service today was more familiar to me from movies. Like one of the great Shakespeare speeches, the graveside oration, studded in fragments in the memory, was a succession of brilliant phrases, book titles, dying cadences that breathed life, pure alertness, along the spine."

"To say that life is nothing but a property of certain peculiar combinations of atoms is like saying that Shakespeare's Hamlet is nothing but a property of a peculiar combination of letters."