“The word "Yankee" itself, I was informed, came from that simplest of Dutch names - Jan.”

“New York interposed itself, once and for all, between me and all other places of origin.”

“As I repeatedly went forth with him and began to understand the ignorance and contradictions and language difficulties with which he contended, and the doubtful sources of his information and the seemingly bottomless history and darkness out of which the dishes of New York emerge, the deeper grew my suspicion that his work finally consisted of minting or perpetuating and in any event circulating misconceptions about his subject and in this way adding to the endless perplexity of the world.”

“I see, I tell him, looking from him to Rachel and again to him.Then I turn to look for what it is we're supposed to be seeing.”

“I found it idiotically distressing that a sharp finger whistle could no longer summon them outdoors into a playful twilight. An ancient discovery was now mine to make: to leave is to make nothing less than a mortal action. The suspicion came to me for the fist time that they were figures of my dreaming, like the loved dead: my mother and all these vanished boys. And after Mama's cremation I could not rid myself of the notion that she had been placed in the furnace of memory even when alive and, by extension, that one's dealings with others, ostensibly vital, at a certain point become dealings with the dead.”

“I was just a boy on a boat in the universe.”

“You know what my motto is?'I didn't think people had mottoes anymore,' I said.Think fantastic,' Chuck said. 'My motto is, Think fantastic.”