“Let us be as the Cage has never been able to make us. Let us now all at once face forward in our boxes, still and silent as nightmares.We did.”

“Were there always to be more damage, damage would be an aspect of perfection. We would all be angels, one-legged and faceless, seething with endless, hopeless praise. Bless Adonai for making us better than angels. Blessed is Adonai for making us human.”

“Yet this wasn’t like sports, let alone sports movies. The roles weren’t fixed, nor the meaning of the scaffolding. It didn’t have to be this way. They might have, for instance, all felt stronger. They might have felt stronger and come together. They might have decided that, rather than now, as they’d been mistaken before: that if their enemies cheered the same damage as they, then they weren’t their enemies after all. They might have concluded their interests were mutual, that some other force, earlier—some other enemy—had confused and divided them, and that all those who cheered were thus allies unmasked.Instead they felt bitter, tricked by each other, last-strawed underdogs, suckers on the mend. Their enmity swelled and they fought even harder.”

“Maholtz asked me, “Why do you hate me?”I said, Everyone hates you.“I know,” he said. “I know that,” he said, “but they hate me cause I scared them or had what they wanted. You weren’t ever scarend of me. You never wanted what I had. Except for the sap. And then you took it, and now I don’t have it, so why do you hate me?”Maybe it’s your accent.“I’m from Pinttsburgh,” he said.Maybe you shouldn’t be.“I can’t help where I’m from.”We turned at Main Hall. Feld was talking to Forrest Kenilworth and Cody. The chair sat dripping in front of the door.So maybe it’s your face. The way you look at girls like you’re scheming to corner them.“I was borng this way, though. I can’t help how my face loonks.”So maybe it’s all the banced thing that you say.“They just come out of me. I’m hated, I feel it. I say those things without thinking, from hurnt. I can’t help that either. It’s not my faulnt.”I guess, then, I hate you for being so helpless.”

“And that is why, when he finally did come across the street, I lit my cigarette with my lighter - not to make him feel like a fool who had fallen for a trick, but rather because he had said, 'you had better luck with matches,' when in fact I had not. It was not the matches that brought him across the street. It was the matches that kept him on the bench.”

“Don't you feel as though you could love everything starting tomorrow, and everything could love you, if only you took an action to set into motion the coming of our new tomorrow and its tomorrow and that one's tomorrow? Shotgun loaded hand on the pump and no matter who you damage you're still a false prophet, but we drink chocolate milk and then we get muscles and smash down the droves with fists like hammers and then we pump the fists in the air for victory. I be the prophet of the doom that is you. You are the mess in messiah.”

“The further south the throng went, the more reasons it discovered. Vendettas once sworn for half-forgotten offenses were remembered and invented with each passing blow. Everyone felt like a conduit of justice.”