“He had a point. The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large. Then Trout made a good point, too. 'Well,' he said, 'I used to be a conservationist. I used to weep and wail about people shooting bald eagles with automatic shotguns from helicopters and all that, but I gave it up. There's a river in Cleveland which is so polluted that it catches fire about once a year. That used to make me sick, but I laugh about it now. When some tanker accidentally dumps its load in the ocean, and kills millions of birds and billions of fish, I say, 'More power to Standard Oil,' or whoever it was that dumped it.' Trout raised his arms in celebration. 'Up your ass with Mobil gas,' he said.”

“The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large.”

“It's a tricky balancing act, finding that point between safety and danger where you can feel both secure and adventurous. I used to read books about fishing by people who had given up jobs and careers to show up every day at a trout stream. What made them do it? They realized, after years of fortifying the walls, of making life safe and secure, that they also needed what was on the other side.”

“I don’t know about lying for novelists. I look at some of the great novelists, and I think the reason they are great is that they’re telling the truth. The fact is they’re using made-up names, made-up people, made-up places, and made-up times, but they’re telling the truth about the human being—what we are capable of, what makes us lose, laugh, weep, fall down, and gnash our teeth and wring our hands and kill each other and love each other.”

“For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil. And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born.”

“Yeah whatever," Andrew said impatiently. "He came back to the room that night and kept talking about this girl he'd seen at the stargazing. He was shy, and so I told him if he pointed you out, I'd try to finagle a meeting." I swear, Andrew's the only person in the world who could use a word like finagle with a straight face. "But he was talking about me," I said. Andrew shrugged. "When we figured it out, we had a good laugh about it," he said defensively. "But of course you were my girlfriend. So that was that.”