“A hotel, he told me, was a big house where a lot of people lived and ate and slept, but no one knew each other. He said that described most families in the outside world.”

“In the outside world, he said, people were visited in their houses by spirits they called television.Spirits spoke to people through what they called the radio.”

“In the outside world, he told me, there was no real silence.”

“In the outside world, my brother told me, people were as reckless as animals and fornicated with strangers on the street.”

“Your dad was in a street gang?" My adopted dad was an accountant for a big Fortune 500 corporation. Him, me, and my adopted mom lived in the suburbs in an English Tudor house with a gigantic basement where he fiddled with model trains. The other dads were lawyers and research chemists, but they all ran model trains. Every weekend they could, they'd load into a family van and cruise into the city for research. Snapping pictures of gang members. Gang graffiti. Sex workers walking their tracks. Litter and pollution and homeless heroin addicts. All this, they'd study and bicker about, trying to outdo each other with the most realistic, the grittiest scenes of urban decay they could create in HO train scale in a subdivision basement”

“Churches in the outside world, my brother told me, were just the local stores that sold people lies made up in the distant factories of giant religions.”

“Adam said the other blessing you have to give up in the outside world is darkness.”