“Who can know God's intentions? Who can know Hid Mind?" She looked at the coffin, lying there like a giant question mark. Like the monolith in 2001. One big fucking question, But at the end of the day, who need a God who'd let Michael get so lost that he'd do something like this? What was the point of a Devil if there was a God like that? Maybe there was just the Devil, the real God of this lousy world. Or maybe there was just nothing at all. And everybody was sitting around praying to a great big nothing, like people praying to airplanes, thinking they were gods. The world one big cargo cult.”

“Maybe there was just the Devil, the real God of this lousy world.”

“Now was too big, like a giant dark planet coming up over the horizon. she wanted then. That's what he'd seen that day, a brightness with darkness all around, watching her, as if she were glamorous, as if she were a rare and mysterious creature.”

“The nearest I'd come to feeling anything like God was the plan blue cloudless sky and a certain silence, but how do you pray to that?”

“The world that was the emonation of divine had been reduced to a handful of dust. Thousands of people, all caught in profile looked into their mobile fish tanks. Each face, each car, transporting grief, boredom, rage. Someone in one of these cars was contemplating murder. Someone, rite now, in the privecy of his aquarium, threaded the beads of his suicide through his fingers, praying along the chain like a rosary. Someone begged for help from a God he didnt quite believe in, yet had no one else to appeal to. ”

“I wondered why it had to be so poisonous. Oleanders could live through anything, they could stand heat, drought, neglect, and put out thousands of waxy blooms. So what did they need poison for? Couldn't they just be bitter? They weren't like rattlesnakes, they didn't even eat what they killed. The way she boiled it down, distilled it, like her hatred. Maybe it was a poison in the soil, something about L.A., the hatred, the callousness, something we didn't want to think about, that the plant concentrated in its tissues. Maybe it wasn't a source of poison, but just another victim.”

“what was the point in creating something that was so futile and so precious? everything beautiful was like that. a little bit of the true world. beauty said there was something more than just one fucking thing after another. time could rest for a moment, stop and that senseless motion. people thot beauty was bullshit, just a bandaide slapped over the abyss, but they couldnt be more wrong. beauty mattered, it was the only thing that fed you when everything turned to shit. ”