“This is the point where the knowing, irony-infused author laughs along with his readers about his time among the aphorisms, how he was once so gullible and needy that he drank deeply of such weak and fruity Kool-Aid. That's some other book. Slogans saved my life. All of them--the dumb ones, the preachy ones, the imperatives, the cliches, the injunctives, the gooey, Godly ones, the shameless, witless ones.”

“At some point he realized that he knew howshe felt—once you know how much you love someone, no one else would do.”

“Memories are like that. They live between synapses and between the people who hold them. Memories, even epic ones, are perishable from their very formation even in people who don't soak their brains in mood-altering chemicals. There is only so much space on any one person's hard drive, and old memories are prone to replacement by newer ones.”

“...-you know no one wanted to see the old boy go. I bet where ever he is, the fishing's good" "Given his surely behavior, the fish might be fried where he is,”

“He looked around at the others....They were all staring at their computers, or reading books or newspapers. Not one of them has noticed the weather. Maybe that's how the world was now....Everyone was so wrapped up in his or her own little world that no one ever really saw anything anymore.”

“Most of my stories are not nice ones, their heroic aspects dimmed by the fact that the hand which struck me was my own. Truly ennobling narratives describe a person overcoming the bad hand that fate has dealt him, not someone like me, who takes good cards and sets them on fire.”

“But I've seen enough to know that we all carry a measure of guilt and innocence among us.”