“Dag insists that all dogs secretly speak the English language and subscribe to the morals and beliefs of the Unitarian church...”

“Their talk was endless, compulsive, and indulgent, sometimes sounding like the remains of the English language after having been hashed over by nuclear war survivors for a few hundred years.”

“But Dag, for all of his efforts, might as well have been talking to a cat. Our parents’ generation seems neither able nor interested in understanding how marketers exploit them. They take shopping at face value.”

“Trevor realized that the odd thing about English is that no matter how much you screw sequences word up up, you understood, still, like Yoda, will be. Other languages don't work that way. French? Dieu! Misplace a single le or la and an idea vaporizes into a sonic puff. English is flexible: you can jam it into a Cuisinart for an hour, remove it, and meaning will still emerge.”

“You keep waiting for the moral of your life to become obvious, but it never does. Work, work, work: No moral. No plot. No eureka! Just production schedules and days. You might as well be living inside a photocopier. Your lives are all they're ever going to be.”

“The belief that tomorrow is a different place from today is certainly a unique hallmark of our species.”

“There are a number of things a woman can tell about a man who is roughly twenty-nine years old,sitting in the cab of a pickup truck at 3:37 in the afternoon on a weekday, facing the Pacific,writing furiously on the back of pink invoice slips. Such a man may or may not be employed, butregardless, there is mystery there. If this man is with a dog, then that's good, because it means he'scapable of forming relationships. But if the dog is a male dog, that's probably a bad sign, becauseit means the guy is likely a dog, too. A girl dog is much better, but if the guy is over thirty, anykind of dog is a bad sign regardless, because it means he's stopped trusting humans altogether. Ingeneral, if nothing else, guys my age with dogs are going to be work.Then there's stubble: stubble indicates a possible drinker, but if he's driving a van or a pickuptruck, he hasn't hit bottom yet, so watch out, honey. A guy writing something on a clipboardwhile facing the ocean at 3:37 P.M. may be writing poetry, or he may be writing a letter beggingsomeone for forgiveness. But if he's writing real words, not just a job estimate or somethingbusiness-y, then more likely than not this guy has something emotional going on, which couldmean he has a soul.”