“Driving to pick up his son, Bennie alternated between the Sleepers and the Dead Kennedys, San Francisco bands he'd grown up with. He listened for muddiness, the sense of actual musicians playing actual instruments in an actual room. Nowadays the quality (if it existed at all) was usually an effect of analogue signaling rather than bona fide tape - everything was an effect in the bloodless constructions Bennie and his peers were churning out. He worked tirelessly, feverishly, to get things right, stay on top, make songs that people would love and buy and download as ring tones (and steal, of course) - above all, to satisfy the multinational crude-oil extractors he'd sold his label to five years ago. But Bennie knew that what he was bringing into the world was shit. Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. An aesthetic holocaust!”

“The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh.”

“Even though Tom wasn't moving, he seemed to be a little farther away. For the first time Benny realized that there were other people in the hallways. They were indistinct, more of a sense of movement in the gray light rather than specific shapes. He thought he recognized one of them, though. "Chong?" The figure stopped moving, but he stood with his back to Benny. "Tom-is that Chong?" "Is that Chong?" Benny asked again. "Is...is he going with you?”

“Nix still held Benny's hand, and her grip tightened to an almost crushing force, grinding his hand bones together. It hurt, but Benny would rather have cut that hand off than take it back at that moment. If it would help Nix through this, he'd give her a pair of pliers and a vise so she could do a proper job.”

“He was too busy checking out and checking in, making and breaking plans, buying and losing cell phones, playing computer games and pool, looking at stock quotes, and living the chaotic life that effectively took up all his energy and time.”

“For Miles, one of the great mysteries of marriage was that you had to actually say things before you realized they were wrong. Because he'd been saying the wrong thing to Janine for so many years, he'd grown wary, testing most of his observations in the arena of his imagination before saying them out loud, but even then he was often wrong. Of course, the other possibility was that there was no right thing to say, that the choice wasn't between right and wrong but between wrong, more wrong, and as wrong as you can get. Wrong, all of it, to one degree or another, by definition, or by virtue of the fact that Miles himself was the one saying it.”