“The desert doesn't care who you are, and neither does anyone or anything who lives in it.”

“Characteristic of the overall difference between Boston and New York, the population at the Acropolis was far less forlorn. Its customers were just those who, for whatever reason, wanted to eat coffee-shop food at very strange hours.”

“Even at a young age one sometimes recognizes that there are behavior patterns that would simply be a waste of time for everyone concerned, which leads you to put them out of your mind or avoid them until you reach a certain stage of inebriation, whereupon everything is reconsidered again.”

“Charlie Black: Fourierism was tried in the late nineteenth century… and it failed. Wasn’t Brook Farm Fourierist? It failed. Tom Townsend: That’s debatable. Charlie Black: Whether Brook Farm failed? Tom Townsend: That it ceased to exist, I’ll grant you, but whether or not it failed cannot be definitively said. Charlie Black: Well, for me, ceasing to exist is — is failure. I mean, that’s pretty definitive. Tom Townsend: Well, everyone ceases to exist. Doesn’t mean everyone’s a failure.”

“My friend died doing what he loved ... Heroin.”

“If nature abhors a vacuum, historiography loves a void because it can be filled with any number of plausible accounts;Howe, Nicholas, Anglo-Saxon England and the postcolonial void”

“A negro in the White House? Oh no! Some people thought we'd never set foot in the White House again since we built it!!!!”