“I'm living in this world. I'm what, a slacker? A "twentysomething"? I'm in the margins. I'm not building a wall but making a brick. Okay, here I am, a tired inheritor of the Me generation, floating from school to street to bookstore to movie theater with a certain uncertainty. I'm in that white space where consumer terror meets irony and pessimism, where Scooby Doo and Dr. Faustus hold equal sway over the mind, where the Butthole Surfers provide the background volume, where we choose what is not obvious over what is easy. It goes on...like TV channel-cruising, no plot, no tragic flaws, no resolution, just mastering the moment, pushing forward, full of sound and fury, full of life signifying everything on any given day...”

“...living here, you don't know anything about white people. Where I'm from, everything is mixed. In Atlanta, at least out here where we stay at, everything is so black that y'all don't know what it feels like to be black.”

“And I wonder if there is really any point to what I'm doing, or what I'm supposed to make of a world where a man can get rich playing "let's pretend”

“I'm standing here, holding a half a lemon in my hand. I'm speechless, I'm excited . . . I'm a wreck. Caleb wants to be where I am.”

“Where I'm living is not a storybook world. It's the real world, full of gaps and inconsistencies and anticlimaxes.”

“By the time I had finished my coffee and returned to the streets, the rain had temporarily abated, but the streets were full of vast puddles where the drains where unable to cope with the volume of water. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you would think that if one nation ought by now to have mastered the science of drainage, Britain would be it.”