“Ybon was the one who suggested calling the wait something else. Yeah, like what? Maybe, she said, you could call it life.”

“If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make who would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?”

“We ought to call it something,’ said Banokles thoughtfully. ‘We can’t just keep calling it “that big bastard horse”. It ought to have a name.’ ‘What do you suggest?’ - ‘Arse Face.”

“Vince and I had reached the point where there was nothing else we could think of to do with the taco wrapper, and since he refused to draw straws for the privilege of telling Deborah, I'd been forced to make the call to give her the news that we'd come up blank. And three minutes later, here she was, striding into our lab like avenging fury."Goddamn it," she said before she was even all the way in the room, "I need something from you!""Maybe a sedative?" Vince suggested, and for once I thought he was right on the money.”

“Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading--that is a good life. A day that closely resembles every other day of the past ten or twenty years does not suggest itself as a good one. But who would not call Pasteur's life a good one, or Thomas Mann's?”

“Sometimes I feel like I have walked into the middle of a movie. Maybe I can make my own movie. The film will be the story of my life. No, not my life, but of this experience. I'll call it what the lady who is the prosecutor called me. MONSTER.”