“Before any of it could make sense, it had to be heard.”

“She had heard it said that, before you could understand anybody, you needed to walk a mile in their shoes, which did not make a whole lot of sense, because probably AFTER you had walked a mile in their shoes, you would understand that they were chasing you and accusing you of the theft of a pair of shoes--although, of course, you could probably outrun them, owing to their lack of footwear.”

“If the season could ever have any salvation, if it could ever makes sense again, it would have to come tonight under a flood of stars on the flatiron plains, before thousands of fans who had once anointed him the chosen son but now mostly thought of him as just another nigger.”

“This chapter is about the dieter's philosophy of food, and it will repeat a lot of things you've heard before. However, you've heard them before because they make sense, and you're still fat because you ignored them. Now is the time to change that.”

“She felt, as she felt so often with Murphy, spattered with words that went dead as soon as they sounded; each word obliterated, before it had time to make sense, by the word that came next; so that in the end she did not know what had been said. It was like difficult music heard for the first time.”

“…any cat he spoke to would stay quite still with an expression of faint surprise on its face as if it had never heard such good sense in all its life nor ever expected to again.”