“Isn't it possible that this midcentury moment enters the skin more lastingly than the vast shaping strategies of eminent leaders, generals steely in their sunglasses -- the mapped visions that pierce our dreams?”

“I want to bottle-fuck you slowly with my sunglasses on.”

“Prayer is a practical strategy, the gaining of temporal advantage in the capital markets of Sin and Remission.”

“Let's examine the nature of the beast, so to speak. The male animal. Isn't there a fund, a pool, a reservoir of potential violence in the male psyche?… Isn't there a deep field, a sort of crude oil deposit that one might tap if and when the occasion warrants? A great dark lake of male rage. ... Isn't there a sludgy region you'd rather not know about? A remnant of some prehistoric period when dinosaurs roamed the earth and men fought with flint tools? When to kill was to live? ... Only your code allows you to enter the system.”

“Even when you self-destruct, you want to fail more, lose more, die more than others, stink more than others.”

“Every time she saw a videotape of the planes she moved a finger toward the power button on the remote. Then she kept on watching. The second plane coming out of that ice blue sky, this was the footage that entered the body, that seemed to run beneath her skin, the fleeting sprint that carried lives and histories, theirs and hers, everyone's, into some distance, out beyond the towers.”

“[Lee Oswald] saw himself as part of something vast and sweeping. He was the product of a sweeping history, he and his mother, locked into a process, a system of money and property that diminished their human worth every day, as if by scientific law. The books made him part of something. Something led up to his presence in this room, in this particular skin, and something would follow. Men in small rooms. Men reading and waiting, struggling with secret and feverish ideas.”