“It is not a thing that you can imagine. It only is. After that, there can be no imagining.”

“I can only hold on to the things I want to lose.”

“...that's the business model. How quickly can they be made to grow, how tightly can they be packed, how much or little can they eat, how sick can they get without dying. This isn't animal experimentation, where you can imagine some proportionate good at the other end of the suffering. This is what we feel like eating... Why doesn't a horny person have as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to killing and eating it? It's easy to dismiss that question but hard to respond to it... How riveting wold the sound of a tortured animal need to be to make you want to hear it that badly?”

“I imagine a line, a white line, painted on the sand and on the ocean, from me to you.”

“We could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one, but this is the one that happened.”

“Is this why you think you are chosen by God, because only you can understand the funnies that you make about yourself?”

“Do you think I'm wonderful? she asked him one day as they leaned against the trunk of a petrified maple. No, he said. Why? Because so many girls are wonderful. I imagine hundreds of men have called their loves wonderful today, and it's only noon. You couldn't be something that hundreds of others are.”