“Lina liked going to the market plaza. It was always alive with people and animals, and the market had things she'd never seen before-sandals made of old truck tires, hats and baskets woven of straw.”

“An old market had stood there until I'd been about six years old, when the authorities had renamed it the Olde Market, destroyed it, and built a new market devoted to selling T-shirts and other objects with pictures of the old market. Meanwhile, the people who had operated the little stalls in the old market had gone elsewhere and set up a thing on the edge of town that was now called the New Market even though it was actually the old market.”

“The marketing people are always talking about something called 'consumers'. I have this image of a fat little man in baggy Bermuda shorts, a Hawaiian shirt, and a straw hat with beer-can openers dangling from it, clutching fistfuls of dollars.”

“Markets go up. Markets go down. We always make money.... Get used to it”

“There'll always be a market for shit, of course. Just look at Jeffrey Archer! He writes like old people fuck doesn't he?”

“Lissa knelt down, compassion on her face. I wasn't surprised, since she'd always had a thing for animals. She'd lectured me for days after I'd instigated the infamous hamster-and-hermit-crab fight. I'd viewed the fight as a testing of worthy opponents. She'd seen it as animal cruelty.”