“Toronto's already ass-deep in cockroaches and conservatives; what's one more lower life-form?”

“You cannot disgrace a disgraceful man; you cannot make a shameless man feel ashamed; you cannot make a cockroach a cockroach, because it is already a cockroach!”

“People, she was discovering, were like cockroaches: If you allowed one in, more were sure to follow.”

“The richness of our ethnic insults vocabulary was wide and deep. It reflected, all too easily, the more elaborate predjiduces of our parents (not my parents), which in their rabid form, had already resulted in tribal bloodbaths.”

“Simply to render oneself able to understand what other Christian thinkers have themselves come to understand and to more or less felicitously communicate requires that one's mind not be a blank slate but already properly formed, disciplined, and exercised.”

“The ability to accessorize is what elevates us from lower-life forms," I said in my lecture voice, choosing a pair of diamond-studded drops for my ear. "Like men.”