“...so I just finished stuffing my bike with invisible air and went home; and thus ended my career as a hostage- briefly, inconclusively, with consummate inconsequentiality: a nonevent realizing its full potential, brave new currents in con­temporary invisibility-”

“in fact, while I was sitting there, listening to all the voices painting the quiet living room, the situation reminded me, somewhat, of a movie I once saw; it was called Rashomon, and at the end of it, for some reason, I cried; I remember that I didn't want the movie to end, to resolve itself in any way at all; I wanted the movie just to keep going, to keep coming up with more versions of its story, to keep producing more characters so they could add their takes on the tale; so I was really upset when the film felt the need to come to a conclusion and the lights came up; I remember walking home holding my fist to my mouth, to keep my crying from lathering out;”

“Now my sole function in this world is to serve as receptacle for the proof that I am inconsequential; every experience I accrete is only another stroke of an eraser.”

“I hear his heartbeats as my own, I feel his urgency as my own, our covalent union making of us both a new, charged, unknown substance; so too my skin, my liquidy skin, is both our separation and our merger, it is our shared, evanescent frontier; yet when he kisses the valley of my belly so long and so shiver-warm I realize that I am also beyond his skin's extremity, I am past the barrier of his skin, I am also living within him, for the juncture is no longer clear: utterly, entirely, I feel his response to me, I feel his churning when I surge; and it is sublime circuitry, this overlap, this confusion, giving me new contours, new periphery, expand­ing me into added dimensions,...”

“The man holding me had a pistol in his other hand; I saw it in the comer of my eye just before I felt its cold hardness crunch into my temple; pressed against my face, the pistol was hard in a way that seemed absolute, bone-smashing, beyond argument, and cold in a way that seemed perfect and permanent;”

“I would next like to work in anthropology; for here, if I may say so, I believe I have much to contribute-indeed, I believe I am on the verge of substantiating significant advances both theoretical and practical; yes, my inquisitors, I assure you this is true; for I have established, on my own, as an unaffiliated scholar, no less than a new definition of Man- yes, him- one that is easily more rigorous than any heretofore proposed; forget opposable thumbs, disregard use of tools,lay down language capacity or abstract reasoning-those are clearly insufficient; my definition easily surpasses these provisional flouncings in accuracy, comprehensiveness, and elegance; and it is this: man is the animal who pisses where he shouldn't;”

“...when I read to her, her quietness, her peacefulness, was what I sought to hear, and it echoed in me as if in an expanding cavern, and often left me trembling with love; and so, then and there, after taking a final gulp of my decaf, I decided to indulge in even more self-pampering: I lifted my legs down from the chair, and, with lightness and celerity, stole upstairs...”