“Rather than sleep, Tibbets crawled through the thirty-foot tunnel to chat with the waist crew, wondering if they knew what they were carrying. "A chemist's nightmare," the tail gunner, Robert Caron, guessed, then "a physicist's nightmare." "Not exactly," Tibbets hedged. Tibbets was leaving by the time Caron put two and two together:'Tibbets stayed a little longer, and then started to crawl forward up the tunnel. I remembered something else, and just as the last of the Old Man was disappearing, I sort of tugged at his foot, which was still showing. He came sliding back in a hurry, thinking maybe something was wrong. "What's the matter?"I looked at him and said, "Colonel, are we splitting atoms today?"This time he gave me a really funny look, and said, "That's about it.”

“I love Israel, I go back all the time. I just love New York a little more. My workers are Arabs, my best friend is a black man from Alabama, my girlfriend's a Puerto Rican, and my landlord is a half-Jew bastard. You know what I did this morning? I read in the paper yesterday that the circus is setting up in the Madison Square Garden, they said the elephants would be walking through the Holland Tunnel at dawn. I'm a photographer a little too, you know? So I get up at five o'clock, bike over to the tunnel, and wait. It turns out the paper got it wrong, they came through the Lincoln, but still, you know? This is a hell of a place.”

“My cousin tried to kill me today," he said. He realized that his voice held an edge of hysteria. "She nearly succeeded. But I guess that's fair, since I was trying to kill her at the time.”

“Maybe man is nothing in particular,' Cross said gropingly. 'Maybe that's the terror of it. Man may be just anything at all. And maybe man deep down suspects this, really knows this, kind of dreams that it is true; but at the same time he does not want really to know it? May not human life on this earth be a kind of frozen fear of man at what he could possibly be? And every move he makes might not these moves be just to hide this awful fact? To twist it into something which he feels would make him rest and breathe a little easier? What man is is perhaps too much to be borne by man...”

“He didn’t get it—guys like that never flirted with men like him.In spite of the fact he was a cop, which he liked to hope had givenhim a little bit of visible macho cool after eight years on the job,his sister still said his looks and style were “nerd meets librarian,”which to him meant he was about as bland as they came. Notexactly a balm to his ego. The man sprawled out in the chair overhis right shoulder, however, didn’t have a bland bone in his comeon-baby-you-know-you-want-to-fuck-me body.”

“[Chemist Michael] Polanyi found one other necessary requirement for full initiation into science: Belief. If science has become the orthodoxy of the West, individuals are nevertheless still free to take it or leave it, in whole or in part; believers in astrology, Marxism and virgin birth abound. But "no one can become a scientist unless he presumes that the scientific doctrine and method are fundamentally sound and that their ultimate premises can be unquestionably accepted.”

“That's not such a bad thing,' he said to me. 'In nightmares we can think the worst. That's what they're for, I guess.”