“the actress playing Celia could ask why god had ever put her on earth.and then the voice from the back of the theater could rumble: "to reproduce. nothing else really interests me. all the rest is frippery.”

“This couple, so involved with babies, had never reproduced themselves, though they could have. This was an interesting comment on the whole idea of reproduction.”

“Really - I'm OK." And he was, too, except that he could find no explanation for why the song had affected him grotesquely. He had supposed for years that he had no secrets from himself. Here was proof that he had a great big secret somewhere inside, and he could not imagine what it was.”

“Midland City had a goddess of discord all its own. This was a goddess who could not dance, would not dance, and hated everybody at the high school. She would like to claw away her face, she told us, so that people would stop seeing things in it that had nothing to do with what she was like inside. She was ready to die at any time, she said, because what men and boys thought about her and tried to do to her made her so ashamed. One of the first things she was going to do when she got to heaven, she said, was to ask somebody what was written on her face and why had it been put there.”

“Mister, when I see my first lady angel, if God ever sees fit to show me one, it’ll be her wings not her face that’ll make my mouth fall open. I’ve already seen the prettiest face that ever could be.”

“I couldn't help wondering if that was what God put me on Earth for--to find out how much a man could take without breaking.”

“As I say, all all he wanted from the manuscript was the string. That was the way he was. Nobody could predict what he was going to be interested in next. On the day of the bomb it was string. [...] He had no use at all for tricks and games and rules that other people made up.”