You see, Frank found out the hard way that the dark things lurking in the night don’t haunt old houses or abandoned ships. They haunt minds.

The phrase 'sodomized by a bratwurst poltergeist' suddenly flew through my mind.

I fear that our loss of a sense of connection with, and duties to, each other leaves us unable to effectively address growing inequality and the bitter antagonism between different communities in American society. We've been at our best when we've felt in significant degree that our fates bound up with each other, where we've had a very inclusive sense of the other, and that's now very much not the case.

... life is a flickering candle we all carry around. A gust of wind, a meaningless accident, a microsecond of carelessness, and it's out. Forever.

I do fear that global capitalism is making us more like each other in regrettable ways, e.g., more people are increasingly captivated by spectacles of violence and aggression or of conspicuous consumption that are the subjects of the most commercially viable films across countries precisely because they don't depend for their appeal on cultural fine points; and more people are prone to deal with others on a purely instrumental and impersonal basis.

They came looking for dark and terrible revelations and instead found out something even more dark and terrible: that their lives were trite and boring.

Globalization in part means that a lot of people are walking into the room and in some cases becoming influential or even dominant voices in the conversation. Sometimes they are like party-crashers coming in and pushing people around, scooping up the valuables and eating up the food in the frig - bribing political leaders, undermining traditional economies and the ways of life that are interwoven with them, replacing them with new economic models that effectively exploit developing countries for their labor and resources.