“New York City, city of exaggerations. Place of Herculean ascensions and perilous falls.”

“So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else and start anew. I wasn't like my parents. I didn't have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been of more philisophical value than in the United States.... and when the [train] plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with it's lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal.”

“But when I roamed New York City, knowing so much and capable of speaking so nicely, and yet so lonely, and often hungry and cold, I learned the joke at the core of American self-improvement: knowledge was so much junk to be processed one way or another at great universities. The real treasure the great universities offered was a lifelong membership in a respected artificial extended family.”

“Any city in any country, including my own hometown, was to me just another place where I might live or might not live.”

“I was not use to that kind of hunger, even as a poor college student.”

“Maybe the end of the world was bound to happen after all.”

“Sometimes, your pet picks you.”