“Imagine a famine. Now imagine a piece of bread. Both of these things are real but you happen to be in the same room with only one of them. Put yourself into a different room, that’s what the mind is for.”

“Toast is when you take a piece of bread—What is bread? Bread is when you take some flour—What is flour? We’ll skip that part, it’s too complicated. Bread is something you can eat, made from a ground-up plant and shaped like a stone. You cook it... Please, why do you cook it? Why don’t you just eat the plant? Never mind that part—Pay attention. You cook it, and then you cut it into slices, and you put a slice into a toaster, which is a metal box that heats up with electricity—What is electricity? Don’t worry about that. While the slice is in the toaster, you get out the...”

“I am like a room where things once happened and now nothing does, except the pollen of the weeds that grow up inside the window, blowing in as dust across the floor.”

“What is toast?” says Snowman to himself, once they’ve run off. Toast is when you take a piece of bread – What is bread? Bread is when you take some flour – What is flour?We’ll skip that part, it’s too complicated. Bread is something you can eat, made from a ground-up plant and shaped like a stone. You cook it . . . Please, why do you cook it?Why don’t you just eat the plant? Never mind that part – Pay attention. You cook it, and then you cut it into slices, and you put a slice into a toaster, which is a metal box that heats up with electricity – What is electricity? Don’t worry about that. While the slice is in the toaster, you get out the butter – butter is a yellow grease, made from the mammary glands of – skip the butter. So, the toaster turns the slice of bread black on both sides with smoke coming out, and then this “toaster” shoots the slice up into the air, and it falls onto the floor . . .Forget it,” says Snowman. “Let’s try again.” Toast was a pointless invention from the Dark Ages. Toast was an implement of torture that caused all those subjected to it to regurgitate in verbal form the sins and crimes of their past lives. Toast was a ritual item devoured by fetishists in the belief that it would enhance their kinetic and sexual powers.Toast cannot be explained by any rational means.Toast is me.I am toast.”

“Only a girl like thiscan know what's happened to you.If she were here she wouldreach out her arms towardsyou now, and touch youwith her absent handsand you would feel nothing, but you would betouched all the same.”

“When they came to harvest my corpse(open your mouth, close your eyes)cut my body from the rope,surprise, surprise:I was still alive.Tough luck, folks,I know the law:you can't execute me twicefor the same thing. How nice.I fell to the clover, breathed it in,and bared my teeth at themin a filthy grin.You can imagine how that went over.Now I only need to lookout at them through my sky-blue eyes.They see their own ill willstaring then in the foreheadand turn tailBefore, I was not a witch.But now I am one.”

“It is very odd to be standing in a locked room in the Penitentiary, speaking with a strange man about France and Italy and Germany. A travelling man. He must be a wanderer, like Jeremiah the peddler. But Jeremiah travelled to earn his bread, and these other sorts of men are rich enough already. They go on voyages because they are curious. They amble around the world and stare at things, they sail across the oceans as if there's nothing to it at all, and if it goes ill with them in one place they simply pick up and move along to another.”