“In Paris the cashiers sit rather than stand. They run your goods over a scanner, tally up the price, and then ask you for exact change. The story they give is that there aren't enough euros to go around. "The entire EU is short on coins."And I say, "Really?" because there are plenty of them in Germany. I'm never asked for exact change in Spain or Holland or Italy, so I think the real problem lies with the Parisian cashiers, who are, in a word, lazy. Here in Tokyo they're not just hard working but almost violently cheerful. Down at the Peacock, the change flows like tap water. The women behind the registers bow to you, and I don't mean that they lower their heads a little, the way you might if passing someone on the street. These cashiers press their hands together and bend from the waist. Then they say what sounds to me like "We, the people of this store, worship you as we might a god.”

“Cashier: Yes, can I help you?Tee-Ay: Yeah, I need a rattle.Cashier: Aisle eight.Tee-Ay: I'm looking for the kind that'll give a fatherless black baby a future, you got any of those?Cashier: Girl, if we sold those, do you think I'd be workin' here?”

“Once more I'm out, at one A.M., in some store trying to purchase bedding plants. The cashier woman says, "They're three for five dollars. You sure you need eight?"I"m distracted, looking at this man behind me.She ask, "You're sure you want to cut it off at eight?"This guy behind me in the checkout lane is wearing a sweater vest and his arms bare. He's waiting with a hundred-dollar bill to pay for Twizzlers and a porterhouse steak.Which leads me to look down at my own self.Do I know you?" he asks softly.No," I say, sighing. "Not in the way you mean.”

“ I'm not sayin', I'm just sayin'"- You use it when you are trying to explain yourself. For example, if someone was wearing a smelly shirt and you said, "Hey, that's a smelly shirt and they gave you a look, like, hey what are you talking about. Then you could say, "I'm not saying it stinks super bad, like it is hurting my nose, or I can hardly breathe when I stand even kind of close to you, or it might even be an ugly shirt, but my eyes are watering so bad because of the stench that I can't tell if it just smells super bad or if it is ugly too…I'm just saying, you might want to change you shirt before someone else smells it. To use the quote, you could shorten your reply by saying, "I'm not saying, I'm just saying you might want to change your shirt before someone else smells it. Just trying to be a friend.”

“You come to work every day but you hardly get to know anyone. I don't even know the names of half the people I see in the elevators. They say the company is a big family, but I don't know them. And even the people I do, like you two, and Elizabeth, and Roger - do I really? I mean, I like you guys, but we only ever talk about work. When I'm out with friends, or at home, I never talk about work. The other day, I tried to explain to my sister why it's such a huge deal that Elizabeth ate Roger's donut, and she thought I was insane. And you know what, I agreed with her. At home I couldn't even think why it mattered. Because I'm a different person at home. When I leave this place at night, I can feel myself changing. Like shifting gears in my head. And you guys don't know that; you just know what I'm like here, which is terrible, because I think I'm better away from work. I don't even like who I am here. Is that just me? Or is everyone different when they come to work? If they are, then what are they really like? How can we ever know? All we know are the Work People.”

“You think what people say is what matters, an older friend told me long ago. You think it's all about words. Well, that's natural, isn't it? I'm a writer, I can float for hours on a word like "amethyst" or "broom" or the way so many words sound like what they are: "earth" so firm and basic, "air" so light, like a breath. You can't imagine them the other way around: She plunged her hands into the rich brown air. Sometimes I think I would like to be a word - not a big important word, like "love" or "truth," just a small ordinary word, like "orange" or "inkstain" or "so," a word that people use so often and so unthinkingly that its specialness has all been worn away like the roughness on a pebble in a creekbed, but that has a solid heft when you pick it up, and if you hold it to the light at just the right angle you can glimpse the spark at its core. But of course what my friend meant was that I ignored inconvenient subtexts, the meaning behind the meaning: that someone might say he loved you, but what really mattered was the way he let your hand go after he said it. It did not occur to me, either, that somebody might just lie, that there are people who lie for pleasure, for the feeling of superiority and power. And yet it should have.”