“And so we went to the Panamint, where Death had gone to gamble and had, as always, won.”

“In spite of where we were, how we had gotten here and why we had come, I felt that at this moment of our lives, this place was exactly where we belonged. We were not drifting but rising, rising toward something right and of significance.”

“Death came, Death went, but Commerce flowed Eternal.”

“Tommy told Sal about the strange white-cloth figure with black stitches that he had found on the front porch. "Sounds like Pillsbury Doughboy gone punk," Sal said.”

“The world needed a little Evil, so Good had something to compare itself to, but you couldn't let it think it had the right-of-way on the road and an invitation to dinner.”

“Her mother said that three great powers kept the universe going. The first and the strongest was God. Each of the two additional powers was as strong as the other: love and imagination. OF the three, God and love were always good. Imagination, however, could be good or bad. Mozart imagined great music into existence. Hitler imagined death camps and built them. Imagination was so powerful that you had to be careful because you could imagine things into existence that you might regret, Everything in the universe was an idea before it was real.”

“Where there is cake, there is hope. And there is always cake.”