“To admit ignorance is the highest knowledge. It is the necessary condition for all learning.”

“All daring and courage, I said, All iron endurance of misfortune, make for a finer, nobler type of manhood.”

“We're all just in our bodies for a moment in our life. Such a brave and lovely act it is to let the body celebrate.”

“All this family shit! Harry said. How can you reinvent your life if the original versions won't leave you alone?”

“At our table in the corner by the window, huddled around a flame in a red glass, all of us, body to body to body to body. The touch that proves you're not alone, that someone else is there.”

“A person without her or his own truth ain't a person at all, Ida said. Anybody who tells you different—is a jackass, and no longer deserves to be called human being.”

“Fuck hope and all the tiny little towns, one-horse towns, the one-stoplight towns, three-bars country-music jukebox-magic parquet-towns, pressure-cooker pot-roast frozen-peas bad-coffee married-heterosexual towns, crying-kids-in-the-Oldsmobile-beat-your-kid-in the-Thriftway-aisles towns, one-bank one-service-station Greyhound-Bus-stop-at-the-Pepsi-Cafe towns, two-television towns, Miracle Mile towns, Viv's Double Wide Beauty Salon towns, schizophrenic-mother towns, buy-yourself-a-handgun towns, sister-suicide towns, only-Injun's-a-dead-Injun towns, Catholic-Protestant-Mormon-Baptist religious-right five-churches Republican-trickle-down-to-poverty family-values sexual-abuse pro-life creation-theory NRA towns, nervous-mother rodeo-clown-father those little-town-blues towns.”