“Thus the great civilizer sends out its emissaries, sooner or later, to every sandy cape and light-house of the New World which the census-taker visits, and summons the savage there to surrender.”

“7. Some Theories that Arose at the Time 1. The world is merely a dream dreamt by god who is waking after a long sleep. When he is properly awake the world will disappear completely. When the world disappears we will disappear with it and be happy. 2. The world has become sensitive to light. In the same way that prolonged use of, say, penicillin can suddenly result in a dangerous allergy, prolonged exposure of the world to the sun has made it sensitive to light. The advocates of this theory could be seen bustling through the city crowds in their long, hooded black robes. 3. The fact that the world is disappearing has been caused by the sloppy work of the Cartographers and the census takers. Those who filled out their census forms incorrectly would lose those items they had neglected to describe. People overlooked in the census by impatient officials would also disappear. A strong pressure group demanded that a new census be taken quickly before matters got worse.- From the story "Do You Love Me?”

“A census taker once tried to test me. I let my front garden eat him.”

“Every civilization when it loses its inner visionand its cleaner energy, falls into a new sort of sordidness,more vast and more stupendous than the old savage sort.An Augean stable of metallic filth.”

“Cape Cod is the bared and bended arm of Massachusetts. The shoulder is at Buzzard's Bay; the elbow at Cape Mallebarre; the wrist at Truro; and the sandy fist at Provincetown.”

“The true test of civilization is not the census, nor the size of the cities, nor the crops – no, but the kind of man the country turns out.”