“Yes, a dark time passed over this land, but now there is something like light.”

“People worried about our passing over into some robotic state, but we were so much like robots already, programmed and easy to manipulate.”

“In all my life I'd never been approached this way, the car pulling up, the Where you going? It was something I wish had happened hundreds of times. I was a looker - someone who looked over at every car at every traffic light, hoping something would happen, and almost never finding anyone looking back - always everyone looking forwards, and every time I felt stupid. Why should people look at you? Why should they care?”

“But we're no longer rain, I said, we're no longer seeds. We're men. Now we can stand and decide. This is our first chance to choose our own unknown. I'm so proud of everything we've done, my brothers, and if we're fortunate enough to fly and land again in a new place, we must continue. As impossible as it sounds, we must keep walking. And yes, there has been suffering, but now there will be grace. There has been pain, but now there will be serenity. No one has been tried the way we have been tried, and now this is our reward.”

“So this is how they lived. For some time Theo, like a tree living in the shadow of taller trees, found a way to live off reflected light.”

“I wanted so many times while driving to flip, to skid and flip and fall from the car and have something happen. I wanted to land on my head and lose half of it, or land on my legs and lose one or both. I wanted something to happen so my choices would be fewer, so my map would have a route straight through, in red. I wanted limitations, boundaries, to ease the burden; because the agony, Jack, when we were up there in the dark, was in the silence! All I ever wanted was to know what to do. In these last months I've had no clue, I've been paralyzed by the quiet, and for a moment something spoke to me, and we came here, or came to Africa, and intermittently there were answers, intermittently there was a chorus and they sang to us and pointing, and were watching and approving, but just as often there was silence, and we stood blinking under the sun, or under the black sky, and we had to think of what to do next.”

“Two chubby, expressionless boys stand to my right. They were once cute children, but now I imagine that they spend hours in dark rooms looking at violent porn. Or perhaps they have tender reveries about being sweet to the girls that they adore from a distance. I'd like to think about them in a generous light -- that they are actually gentle young men -- but it's hard not to stereotype them as potential serial killers. It's their eerie, still blankness that makes me think they're capable of murder -- and the fact that I'm in the Midwest. The Midwest seems to cultivate serial killing. Must be the boxed in geography. (Jonathan Ames, Middle-American Gothic)”