“Tara...seemed to digest gossip as voraciously as an owl, regurgitating it in the form of little pellets of dubious information.”

“Angel?" I said. "Baby penguins eat a regurgitated mixture of partially digested fish, krill, and an oily substance form their fathers' stomachs. Are you willing to eat a bunch of raw fish and krill, and then barf it back up into a baby penguin's cute, cheeping mouth? Like, every hour?" Sometimes my crushing logic astounds even me.”

“It's only gossip if you repeat it. Until then, it's gathering information.”

“Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.”

“You're a romanticist. What do you think a man is, a papaya? To digest your dinner? In pill form?”

“...the self in the twentieth century is a voracious nought which expands like the feeding vacuole of an amoeba seeking to nourish and inform its own nothingness by ingesting new objects in the world but, like a vacuole, only succeeds in emptying them out.”