“I come from a culture of handwringers, vengeance seekers, people who name children after ancestors by rote -- first child, paternal grandfather, second child, maternal, and on and on and on.”

“My tastes, like my bones, fossilized decades ago. Reach a certain age and you are obliged to become an anthropologist. It's the only way to ignore that the rest of the world regards you as an artifact, that your culture has faded beyond the horizon, leaving you adrift on your tiny, solitary life raft.”

“All I meant was that people take their same old lives wherever they go. No place is perfect enough to strip you of that. And some places have a way of magnifying your demons, or of, I don't know, giving them pep pills.”

“Ready how? Who's ever ready for anything important?”

“When it comes to life, we spin our own yarn, and where we end up is really, in fact, where we always intended to be.”

“When most of us talk to our dogs, we tend to forget that they're not people.”

“People take their same old lives wherever they go. No place is perfect enough to strip you of that.”