“She is prettier than her picture had prepared me for, blond curls, big blue eyes, like a fake child that someone would make in order to convince people to have children.”

“She's got a way of making a man feel guilty for certain things he'd never feel bad about on his own, like watching someone shoot himself in the face.”

“Children are not guaranteed the luxuries of family, Ms. Wells," he said. "If people are unable to exist within the parameters that have been created for them, they lose any claim to titles like son and daughter.”

“His writing had become, like a stash of rare and troubling pornography, something that must be kept hidden, an obsession that other people would be mystified to discover.”

“It had all been fake, a choreographed event, but they could not escape the dread that rattled inside their chests. It was a testament to their proficiency and talent as artists. They had affected themselves with the authenticity of the moment.”

“That does not surprise me,' Annie said and once again hung up the phone thinking that she had chosen to surround herself with people who were, for lack of a better term, retarded.”

“He would teach himself to dislike what he actually liked, to approve of what he did not totally understand, in the hopes that he would come out the other side with something that resembled inspiration, something that would make him more famous than Chris Burden or even Hobart Waxman.”