“I think everyone always has time to suffer.”

“Can I ask you something personal?”Six inches but I tell everyone eight.”

“By noon everyone had heard that I had spent the night with Marti in a hotel room and when the cops came by, with our mothers, I had asked for time to get dressed. It was also all over the school that I had deliberately provoked Gratz and lived to tell of it, and that Paul had knocked me flat. And on top of that, Spooky Darla had given me a thermonuclear kiss in public.No getting away from it: I was now Public Madman Number One.”

“Supposedly nobody outside the group knew there was a group. Of course we all knew that wasn't true. High school was like the little clear plastic tunnels that Paul's hamsters lived in: you could run a long way but never get out, and always, everyone could see you.”

“I always liked that time of day, when people were shutting up their shops, putting the town to bed for the night, going home to do normal stuff with their normal families. I wonder if they got to enjoy being normal, to know just how terrific it was, or whether it was just invisible to them like air? Sometimes I got so pissed off at how easy the normal people had it that I just wanted to walk down the street shaking them and screaming into their squishy self-satisfied faces.”

“You know, when someone hurts my feelings, somehow it does not comfort me to know that it was deliberate... On the other hand, knowing that someone else thinks they are assholes helps a great deal." "I think that's some kind of rule for the universe.”

“I would take it as a personal favor if you would use the term Ambient Temperature Risen American.”“Ha, ha, ha.” He saw that Reagan was not smiling. “Ah, of course, anyway, I just wanted to say that many of my close friends are at ambient temperature, in fact many of them have become estates, which I think we have to learn to think of as they are every bit as much a person as any corporation, or any other corporation if the estate happens to be incorporated or own a corporation, because we have to think about that. And I want you to know that I can identify very strongly with that, because, in fact, many of my ancestors are ambient temperature also, as I know from having attended their baptisms.”