“Mrs. Vice turned to the weddings page. She liked to look at the smiling brides and imagine how miserable they would soon be.”

“Liberty clutched him tightly. 'You played a part in my destiny. And maybe I played a part in yours.' That was how things worked, she was beginning to realize. Destiny wasn't something you accomplished by yourself.”

“It's hot as a barbecue the smog is pressed up against the foothills so that you can't even see them. everyone is irritated, but noone argues because noone can breathe. i laid on the couch in my bikini and watched His Girl Friday. I have decided that i will be a journalist like Josland Russel (in the movie) and not take any flak for anyone unless they look and act like Cary Grant.”

“There might be different ways of being dead. Like there are different ways of believing God.”

“When you're a guy you have to act like an asshole sometimes, so that the real asswholes won't bug you.”

“At any time in history, gazillions of lives are being lived simultaneously. In Zimbabwe, Thailand, Tasmania, and Borneo, in the poorest hovel and the richest palace, in the sky and on the moon, the lives of ants, plants, gorillas, and people are going on. But we are generally fixated on that infinitesimal thing in the scope of the universe, ourselves.”

“Later: Midnight. Just woke up with this thought; Maybe Simons right. Maybe there is a spirit that ejects from the body. Even stars, when they die eject hydrogen and helium from their bodies, which fly out in space into infinity.”