“Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joy-sticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.”

“Hey! All you peoples draggin along here. Stop and come stick your ass on a Night of Joy stool," he started again. "Night of Joy got genuine color peoples workin below the minimal wage. Whoa! Guarantee plantation atmosphere, got cotton growin right on the stage right in front your eyeball, got a civil right worker gettin his ass beat up between show. Hey!”

“This was not the old Chichikov. This was some wreckage of the old Chichikov. The inner state of his soul might be compared to a demolished building, which has been demolished so that from it a new one could be built; but the new one has not been started yet, because the infinitive plan has not yet come from the architect and the workers are left in perplexity.”

“Some people create war and misery, some create wealth and money, and some create ideas and art. But we all create our own deaths, fashioned out of our lives. Nobody will remember how you died, if nobody remembers how you lived. Forgoing freak accidents, we all choose how we die by how we live. Suicide, old age, AIDS, Cirrhosis of the liver, our deaths tell of how we lived. And even in a freak accident, if we are worth remembering, our lives will overshadow our deaths. If Henry Ford had gotten run over by a Mercedes, people would still remember him as the driver of the hit and run that changed history with his automobile assembly lines.”

“My life has been shaped by the decision two people made over 24 years ago. They decided to adopt a child. They got me, and I got a chance at the kind of life all children deserve.”

“Men are in fact, quite unable to control their own inventions; they at best develop adaptability to the new conditions those inventions create.”