“Books have souls. Or so romantics like me tend to think.”

“The function of a book is to provide a reading experience.”

“Computers don't kill books; people do.”

“Wal-Mart’s relationship to place has become so abstracted that the company views even its own stores through the conquistador’s eyeglass. Like temporary forts built solely for purposes of territorial conquest, any one of them can be abandoned at any time.”

“Corporations [gained] direct access to what we may think of as our humanity, emotions, and agency but, in this context, are really just buttons.”

“Goldman Sachs and other investment banks understood the ensuing problem so well that they began betting against the very mortgage-backed securities they were underwriting!”

“And to whom were these bundles of unrecognizably mashed-up mortgages ultimately sold? Quite often, to you and me. Our pension funds, municipalities, and money-market accounts were made up largely of these “mortgage-backed securities.”