“These kinds of lost, overeducated mama’s boys were perpetually stumbling down a corridor with two distant exits, one marked HESITANT INTELLECTUAL and the other SHYSTER.”

“Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs. ”

“Cupid's arrow is straight and sharp, never misses its mark, but it leaves one hell of an exit wound.”

“Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down corridors of television sky.”

“No one had ever told them they were worth saving, and they were taught to believe they were forever lost to a world of thievery, prostitution and murder. But it wasn’t true. They were capable of more. She could tell from the way some of them helped each other, the way others sat down at once to begin sewing, the way Ann took aside one of the little boys and patiently showed him how to pick a pocket—”

“Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate.”