“He was assaulting the world by assaulting himself.”

“This isn’t such a beau­ti­ful world that he has to stay in it and suf­fer. This isn’t much of a world at all.”

“During the First World War, I told her, Hitler had been a runner, delivering messages between the German trenches, and he was disgusted by seeing his fellow soldiers visit French brothels. To keep the Aryan bloodlines pure,and prevent the spread of venereal disease, he commissioned an inflatable doll that Nazi troops could take into battle. Hitler himself designed the dolls to have blond hair and large breasts. The Allied firebombing of Dresden destroyed the factory before the dolls could ever go into wide distribution.”

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

“Ten years ago, he was the hard­work­ing salt of the earth. All he want­ed was to go to Heav­en. Sit­ting here to­day, ev­ery­thing that he worked for in the world is lost. All his ex­ter­nal rules and con­trols are gone.”

“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.”