“I took a look out the window before I left the room, though, to see how all the perverts were doing, but they all had their shades down. They were the heighth of modesty in the morning.”

“The best rooms were all on the left-hand side (going in), for these were the only ones to have windows, deep-set round windows looking over his garden and meadows beyond, sloping down to the river.”

“I thought it was real. But by morning, all I had left were fragmented pieces, shifting images with no beginning or end.”

“I took my .38 out and looked to see that there were bullets in all the proper places. I knew there would be, but it did no harm to be careful. And I'd seen Clint Eastwood do it once in the movies.”

“To take the tops off all the houses and mingle our miseries was too simple a solution, I knew. Houses had windows with shades. Yards had gates and fences. There were carefully planned out sidewalks and roads, and these were the paths that, if you chose to go into someone else's reality, you had to be willing to walk. There were no shortcuts.”

“I had seen that look before, on the faces of tourists visiting the Texas Book Depository in Dallas where Lee Harvey Oswald took the shots at JFK. I took that tour and met some conspiracy buffs, all of us standing at the gunman’s window and looking down to the spot where the motorcade passed. It’s right there below the window, an easy shot at a slow-moving car. No mystery, just a kid and a rifle and a tragedy. They came looking for dark and terrible revelations and instead found out something even more dark and terrible: that their lives were trite and boring.”