“Atrocity is truly emperor; All things that thrive are slaves of cruel Creation.”

“We are cruel enough without meaning to be.”

“How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.”

“Some people find fall depressing, others hate spring. I've always been a spring person myself. All that growth, you can feel Nature groaning, the old bitch; she doesn't want to do it, not again, no, anything but that, but she has to. It's a fucking torture rack, all that budding and pushing, the sap up the tree trunks, the weeds and the insects getting set to fight it out once again, the seeds trying to remember how the hell the DNA is supposed to go, all that competition for a little bit of nitrogen; Christ, it's cruel.”

“We were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn't big enough for all that wanting. I don't know. I don't know anything”

“You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.”

“The thing about her is, she’s good-natured. He knew it the second he saw her standing by the parking meters. He could just tell from the soft way her belly looked. With women, you keep bumping against them, because they want different things, they’re a different race. Either they give, like a plant, or scrape, like a stone. In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman’s good nature.”