“After all the talk about the end of the world the irony was that it actually happened.”

“You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.”

“Leaf blowers have taken a world which was, on the whole, a decent place to live, in spite of talk radio, and turned it into a noisy and unpleasant vale filled with atomized bits of vegetal detritus.”

“After all that I'd been through, after all that I'd learned and all that I'd been given, I was going to do what I had been doing every day for the last few years now: just show up and do the best that I could do with whatever lay in front of me.”

“It was a trap after all,” Alric said. He turned to Royce. “My apologies for doubting your sound paranoia.”

“Hanging out with Sam or any two-year-old is basically one big suicide watch. Their mission is to find one new way after another of offing themselves - piss in an electric socket, lick a pit bull's nose, chase an ice cream truck into traffic - and your job as a parent is to step in before it happens.”

“And so, in the end, the question of markets is really a question about how we want to live together. Do we want a society where everything is up for sale? Or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?”