“The disc, being flat, has no real horizon. Any adventurous sailor who got funny ideas from staring at eggs and oranges for too long and set out for the antipodes soon learned that the reason why distant ships sometimes looked as though they were disappearing over the edge of the world was that they were disappearing over the edge of the world.”

“And they disappear over that flat blue horizon and onto another.”

“Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances. The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.”

“There was a Japanese TV set in front of us. There were Japanese TV sets all over the prison. They were like portholes on an ocean liner. The passengers were in a state of suspended animation until the big ship got where it was going. But anytime they wanted, the passengers could look through a porthole and see the real world out there.Life was like an ocean liner to a lot of people who weren't in prison, too, of course. And their TV sets were portholes through which they could look while doing nothing, to see all the World was doing with no help from them.Look at it go!”

“For so long I have lived on the edge of an invisible world. Sometimes I feel like the scattered debris left over after the personality has fallen out of the sky.”

“There is one thing that has disappeared, not just from the U.S. but from the entire world, is the idea of ever being embarrassed by anything.”