In this country there is a universal third person, the man we all want to be. Advertising has discovered this man. It uses him to express the possibilities open to the consumer. To consume in America is not to buy; it is to dream. Advertising is the suggestion that the dream of entering the third person singular might possibly be fulfilled.

Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile knowledge-market.

We need time to lose interest in things.

You have to break through the structure of your own stonework habit just to make yourself listen.

How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn't they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?

Eye contact was a delicate matter. A quarter second of a shared glance was a violation of agreements that made the city operational.

There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.