“Hiro is a talented drifter. This is the kind of lifestyle that sounded romantic to him as recently as five years ago. But in the bleak light of full adulthood, which is to one's early twenties as Sunday morning is to Saturday night, he can clearly see what it really amounts to: He's broke and unemployed.”

“think that if Hiro was so convinced in his own mind that he was unworthy of her, maybe he knew something she didn't.”

“Hiro feels even at this moment that something has been torn open in the world and that he is dangling above the gap, staring into a place where he does not want to be.”

“Hiro watches the large, radioactive, spear-throwing killer drug lord ride his motorcycle into Chinatown. Which is the same as riding it into China, as far as chasing him down is concerned.”

“Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.”

“It is early in November of 1942 and a simply unbelievable amount of shit is going on, all at once, everywhere.”

“Did you win your sword fight?""Of course I won the fucking sword fight," Hiro says. "I'm the greatest sword fighter in the world.""And you wrote the software.""Yeah. That, too," Hiro says.”