“It's always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.”

“His dreams had always been Houdiniesque: they were the dreams of a pupa struggling in its blind cocoon, mad for a taste of light and air.”

“And, anyway, friendship is different in another language; a foreign friend doesn't have to understand what you feel, and I don't expect it. It's enough if he understands what you just said.”

“Accurate prediction of the future, of its technologies and traumas, has always seemed to me to be the least interesting thing about science fiction. The Killer Hook.”

“See you in the funny papers," he said. Jaunty, he reminded himself; always jaunty. In my panache is their hope for salvation.”

“I took comfort, as a kid, in knowing that things had always been as awful and as wonderful as they were now, that the world was always on the edge of total destruction.”

“At the far end of the library, a number of men had gathered into a tight, jostling ring around a very pretty, very young woman who was talking at what must have been the top of her lungs. Joe could not really understand what she was telling them, but it appeared to be a story that reflected poorly on her own judgment - she was blushing and grinning at the same time - and it unquestionably ended with the word "fuck." She tugged on the word, drawing it out to several times its usual length. She wound it all the way around her in two or three big loops and reveled in it as if it were a luxuriant shawl.”