“Whenever the media do try to pick it up, it slides like a lone noodle from their chopsticks.”

“Well,' Rydell said, trying to pick up his end, 'I was watching this one old movie last night-'Sublett perked up. 'Which one?'Dunno,' Rydell said. 'This guy's in L.A. and he's just met this girl. Then he picks up a pay phone, 'cause it's ringing. Late at night. It's some guy in a missile silo somewhere who knows they've just launched theirs at the Russians. He's trying to phone his dad, or his brother, or something. Says the world's gonna end in short order. Then the guy who answered the phone hears these soldiers come in and shoot the guy. The guy on the phone, I mean.'Suhlett closed his eyes, scanning his inner trivia-banks. 'Yeah? How's it end?'Dunno,' Rydell said. 'I went to sleep.”

“The future is there," Cayce hears herself say, "looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.”

“Wonderful", the Flatline said, "I never did like to do anything simple when I could do it ass-backwards.”

“The faces he woke up with in the worlds hotels were like God's own hood ornaments. Women's sleeping faces, identical and alone, naked, aimed straight out to the void.”

“Laney felt the pills he'd taken, the ones that were supposed to cushion the jet lag, drop out from under him like some kind of rotten pharmacological scaffolding.”

“The future is there... looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.”