“Now she understood a few things: that the American academy, which one might have thought the place to defend freedom of speech, had been the seat and soul of abrogating freedom of speech, if the first assault on its freedom can be said to be restricting, or handcuffing speech. The day she heard “redneck” on NPR, she turned NPR off, not because broadcasters were still using the term, but because she knew one day they would not be. In fact, she had a vision of the quiet moment backstage at a Boston studio when a good, surprised correspondent was let go for saying “redneck” the last time it would be said.”

“She thought it funny how the poor environment had been raped just fine until there was a sufficient excess of the people who had effected the raping to produce sufficient numbers of themselves who were sufficiently idle that they might begin to protest the raping of the environment, which was irretrievably lost to the raping by that point.And this would be the great soothing cathedral music, the stopping of the chainsaws amid the patter of acid rain, that all good citizens would listen to for the quarter-century it took them all to wire up to cyberspace and forget about the lost hopeless run-over gang-ridden land, reproducing madly still all the while, inside their bunkers listening to NPR.”

“today is a good day to give no one a hard time about anything, or today is a good day to give everyone a hard time about everything.”

“Can you imagine doing something in your life that will be fully satisfying and redeeming for your having tried to do it, whether you succeeded in it or failed, and that, correspondingly, would be fully shameful had you not tried to do it?”

“Have you come over time to think that you know more now than you did when you were young, know less now than when young, know now there is so much more to know than you knew there was to know when young that it is moot whether you think you knew more then than now or less, or do you now know that you never knew anything at all and never will and only the bluster of youth persuaded you that you did or would?”

“Would it require more energy than you have in order for you to really lose it, or do you think really losing it can be a function of having too little energy to prevent losing it? Do the people you do not wish to talk to far exceed the number you do wish to talk to? Do you have much to say to even those to whom you do wish to speak? Do you know where it went wrong for you? Do you own any good copper? Are you favorably disposed to American Indian causes but less so if you must say Native American causes? Are you more at ease in a veneer of civilization or in a true hardwood of barbary?”

“try to recall the person you thought you were and the moment you began to realize you are not that person, and try to grasp and appreciate the high quality of lunacy required for you to have ever thought you were that person.”