"We're very good at talking about the individual in American politics and excellent at talking about the government. But we have little ability to even acknowledge everything that exists in the middle, and given how influential politics is on every other part of our life, I think that failure of discourse is pretty corrosive to our overall culture."

"...The way we ended things was not uncommon for kids like us. She said we'd lost enough in our short lives to want to cauterize our wounds before they happened. We burned our connection closed before we felt the holes."

"We’re naked under our clothes; we both know what it’s like to need to fart and hold it in, or not be able to get a hard-on, or worry that a bloke across the room might be looking at your bird and you might have to fight him but he looks well hard."

"I'm not sure this will make sense to you but I felt as though I'd turned around to look in a different direction so that I no longer faced backward toward the past but forward toward the future. And now the question confronting me was this: What would the future be."

"I love New York. You can pop out of the Underworld in Central Park, hail a taxi, head down Fifth Avenue with a giant hellhound loping along behind you, and nobody even looks at you funny.Of course, the Mist helped. People probably couldn't see Mrs. O'Leary, or maybe they thought she was a large,loud,very friendly truck."

"I don't necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that's most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there."

"She was different. She liked hearing it, because she wanted to recall just enough of it to remember that she never wanted to go back to being the person she'd been before."