“I was thinking in a Scottish brogue, because I'd just heard this guy interviewed on NPR, Lonnie McSomething.”

“I wouldn't like to interview John Lennon, no, because I'd ask him one question and it'd go to another thing and I'd end up licking his face.”

“I also thought about that seminar classmate on Adam's ninth birthday. Adam had insisted on going to a pizza-and-games arcade for his party. The only person he'd invited besides his sisters was someone I'll call Lonnie, whom Adam claimed to be his girlfriend. Although I had often heard Adam sing about Lonnie, I had never met her, or seen Adam interact with any girl. I was afraid that he would start humping her leg the second she came in range. These were fears I'd sustained since before he was born; I though all people with Down syndrome were grossly overaffectionate. I was grossly wrong.”

“Billy heard Rosewater say to a psychiatrist, "I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren't going to want to go on living.”

“I just wasn't ready for his stories. They'd breed with the others I'd heard and hatch new monsters, because there was no such thing as separation here, not once you'd started listening. Never listen.”

“I heard a definition once: Happiness is health and a short memory! I wish I'd invented it, because it is very true.”