“Sometimes I think if we didn’t have these problems the whole world would stop spinning on her axis, we’d all stop spinning on our axises, axes, or whatever you want to call them, and then we’d have to settle into the nasty business of finding a way to be happy.”

“To stutter through it with you or even stop stuttering and say nothing, was so lucky and soft, better talk than mile-a-minute with anyone. After a few minutes we’d stop rattling, we’d adjust, we’d settle in, and the conversation would speed into the night.”

“Everyone on earth would never starve and forever find love and happiness, since we won, but if we’d lost, they would have gouged out our eyes and thrown us naked onto hot coals and poisonous snakes for all the cheering and hugging at the end, strangers hugging like the end of The Omega Virus when Steve Sturmine finds the antidote.”

“I realize that this is the way the world works. If I could stop the spin, stop the rotation, I would have done so long ago. I would have stopped it the first moment that Catcher's lips met mine under the moon in the amusement park. I would have held us in that eternity forever. But of course everything presses forward, even as we dig our feet against the reality of it all. One even tumbles from the next out of our control and we are dragged along, helpless.”

“Man's destiny was to conquer and rule the world, and this is what he's done.. almost. He hasn't quite made it, and it looks as though this may be his undoing. The problem is that man's conquest of the world has itself devastated the world. And in spite of all the mastery we've attained, we don't have enough mastery to stop devastating the world.. or to repair the devastation we've already wrought.”

“We’d save up a penny or two, bring them down here, and set them on the tracks. When a train comes, it flattens out that penny, leaving it thin as paper and shaped long, like an egg. But it happens so fast, you can’t see where the train sends that penny flying… We’d look all around, in the sage brush and the prickly pear cactus, until we found them.. And you know what?” He stopped walking and turned to gaze at me now. “We always found them closer than we thought.”“After we’d looked all over Creation, we’d find them somewhere near the tracks, after all.”He said, “Sometimes you do find what you’re looking for closer than you think.”

“The heart's in it then, spinning dreams, and torment is on the way. The heart makes dreams seem like ideas.”