“He said, "The word for moonlight is moonlight.”

“It's all embedded, the hours and minutes, words and numbers everywhere, he said, train stations, bus routes, taxi meters, surveillance cameras. It's all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.”

“Was he at the movies to see a movie, she said, or maybe more narrowly, more essentially, simply to be at the movies?”

“I'm completely aware of Matisse and what he said, that painters must begin by cutting out their tongues.”

“It's healthier to reject certain cautions than fall in line. I assume you know that, he said.”

“If we isolate the stray thought, the passing thought,” he said, “the thought whose origin is unfathomable, then we begin to understand that we are routinely deranged, everyday crazy.”We loved the idea of being everyday crazy. It rang so true, so real.“In our privatest mind,” he said, “there is only chaos and blur. We invented logic to beat back our creatural selves. We assert or deny. We follow M with N.”Our privatest mind, we thought. Did he really say that?“The only laws that matter are laws of thought.”His fists were clenched on the tabletop, knuckles white.“The rest is devil worship," he said.”

“I like your mother. You have your mother's breasts.""Her breasts.""Great stand-up tits." he said”