“I have noticed that even those who assert that everything is predestined and that we can change nothing about it still look both ways before they cross the street.”

“Sorry but nothing of much importance ever happened to me...I'm just a girl who forgot to look both ways before crossing the street.”

“I know you look both ways before you cross the street, but I want you to look both ways a second time, because I told you to.”

“A pessimist is a man who looks both ways when he crosses the street.”

“When we're done with it, we may find—if it's a good novel—that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having meet a new face, crossed a street we've never crossed before.”

“But what has changed? The truth is that nothing changes...It is we who have changed, we who are beguiled by technological change, we who have ceased to believe that a certain situation exists while beginning to believe a new one has replaced it. We still love and hate, suffer and feel joy, resent and admire, covet and sacrifice. We still allow some with power to exploit and marginalize others without power, and we still look on quietly, feeling bad about it all but doing nothing. Nothing at all changes when new technologies are introduced into a culture. Nothing changes but our attitudes about what is and is not “real,” what is and is not “important,” what is and is not worth knowing. And we change because we choose to change, because media, as McLuhan tells us, are nothing more than extensions of us.”