“It seemed not only as though they had everything figured out but were balancing it in their palms as well. The world was borrowing its time from them in order for anything outside of their lives to take place.”

“It was as if knowing that I had to leave revealed something to me that only [he] could explain. But everything felt wrong. In the dim-blue daybreak I began seeing the the entire world reversed and spinning through a deserted tunnel of falsity and sorrow.”

“Even the few days I spend reminiscing in Mexico City seem like memories or dreams. Everything looks different and backward without [him] and his uncertainties. I could have even stayed at the same hotels, in the same rooms even, yet would have never known the difference. Traffic and weather seem painted onto this dull grey canvas of highway, detached from any near past. Nietzsche calls it the separation of body and soul - the improbability of two separate worlds. I was incapable of fitting in anywhere. I was in search of expiation. I would never find it - it had never been there.”

“I remembered how is disheartening and dreadful when you're seeing it for the first time. I thought of my parents and the town where I was born, and suddenly everything around me seemed less real.”

“I knew myself to be in need of not one solution of any caliber, but of an endless string of short-term remedies. Just as soon as I'd become acquainted with anything, it just as quickly became useless to me. ”

“I wanted to mend the entire world all at once, but in such longings found that I'd already caused too much harm.”

“Many peoples practiced agriculture, but they were never obsessed by the delusion that what they were doing was *right*, that everyone in the entire world had to practice agriculture, that every last square yard of the planet had to be devoted to it... If they got tired of being agriculturalists, if they found they didn't like where it was leading them in their particular adaptation, they were *able* to give it up. They didn't say to themselves, 'Well, we've got to keep going at this even if it kills us, because its the *right* way to live.' For example, there was once a people who constructed a vast network of irrigation canals in order to farm the deserts of what is now southeastern Arizona. They maintained these canals for three thousand years and built a fairly advanced civilization, but in the end they were free to say, 'This is a toilsome and unsatisfying way to live, so to hell with it.' They simply walked away from the whole thing and put it so totally out of mind that we don't even know what they called themselves. The only name we have for them is the one the Pima Indians gave them: Hohokam--those who vanished.But it's not going to be this easy for the Takers. It's going to be hard as hell for them to give it up, because what they're doing is *right*... Giving it up would mean that all along they'd been *wrong*. It would mean they'd *never* known how to rule the world. It would mean relinquishing their pretensions to godhood.... It would mean spitting out the fruit of that tree and giving the rule of the world back to the gods.”