“Bib Block was sure that in any part of the country at all, whenever the name of this road was mentioned, people's hearts pivoted like Moslems to the east and flopped over. Sooner of later, he believed, at one stage of the journey or another, all roads led to the New Jersey Turnpike.”

“It was all so long ago and Stalin doesn't matter any more. Stalin lost his chic before you were born. Sex is always chic.”

“The desire to be desire-less is but another desire. The thought that, because this desire purports to be spiritual, it is superior to more mundane desires shows how skilled the mind is at justifying any desire it is attached to.”

“Lured by smooth roads onto a new turnpike, he read with surprise the rules he was handed, don't stop, don't turn around, pay when you get there; he made his escape at the first exit he saw, for fiftyfive cents, and now he was on the old road buzzing the staid turnpike by turns over and under, teasing it crazy.”

“Holy shit," somebody muttered in the dark."A virgin," sputtered another."I didn't know they still made them.""He just did.”

“There is nothing like the smell of a bookstore. If you ask me, it's actually a combination of smells: part library, part new book, and part expectation for what you might find.”

“I give in and light another cigarette even though last night the surgeon general came on the television set and shook his finger at everybody, trying to convince us that smoking will kill us. But Mother once told me tongue kissing would turn me blind and I'm starting to think it's all just a big plot between the surgeon general and Mother to make sure no one ever has any fun.”