“My mind is like the valley—this vast barren waste. Car lots. Malls. Tract homes. I know there are other worlds beyond it—of canyons full of coyote and monarch butterflies, squirrels, bunnies, purple and yellow wildflowers, of magical boulevards lined with palatial movie theaters and movie-star haunted mansions, of parks and palms and palisades, especially, especially of the ocean, where it all ends and everything begins. I know the rest is out there but from where I sit in my head it’s like being on the bottom of a hot sunken pit—you can’t see anything else around you no matter how hard you try.”

“Imagine something. Something that fits in the dark. Say the dark is the sky at night. Imagine something in it.”“A star?”“Yes.”“I can’t. I can’t see it.”“Okay. Don’t try to see it. Try to be it. Would you like to know what it’s like to be one? Be a star?”“A movie star?”“No, a star star. In the sky. Keep your eyes closed, think about what it feels like to be one.” He moved over to her and kissed her shoulder. “Imagine yourself in that dark, all alone in the sky at night. Nobody is around you. You are by yourself, just shining there. You know how a star is supposed to twinkle? We say twinkle because that is how it looks, but when a star feels itself, it’s not a twinkle, it’s more like a throb. Star throbs. Over and over and over. Like this. Stars just throb and throb and throb and sometimes, when they can’t throb anymore, when they can’t hold it anymore, they fall out of the sky.”

“I chose to see emigration and globe-trotting as an escape, not as a loss. Nowhere to call home? No problem, the world is my oyster. Where are you from, they ask. Does it matter, I answer.But it does. Because how can you truly know yourself, and how can you know other place and people, if you don't even know where you come from?”

“You take girls, for example. They're copying their moms and magazines and everything to know how to act around guys. I mean it's not like in movies where girls like assholes or anything like that. It's not that easy. They just like somebody that can give them purpose.”

“I pulled into the Grand Union parking lot and drove to the end of the mall where the bank was located. I parked at a safe distance from other cars, exited the BMW, and set the alarm.You want me to stay with the car in case someone's riding around with a bomb in his backseat looking for a place to put it?" Lula asked.Not necessary. Ranger says the car has sensors."Ranger give you a car with bomb sensors? The head of the CIA don't even have a car with bomb sensors. I hear they give him a stick with a mirror on the end of it.”

“Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop. The line from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland drifted through my mind, and I smiled. Good advice, I supposed – but only if you happened to know where the beginning was, and I didn’t quite.”