I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make me proud to be an American.

True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.

To plot is to live. […] We start out lives in chaos, in babble. As we surge up into the world, we try to devise a shape, a plan. There is dignity in this. Your whole life is a plot, a scheme, a diagram. It is a failed scheme but that's not the point. To plot is to affirm life, to seek shape and control. Even after death, most particularly after death, the search continues. Burial rites are an attempt to complete the scheme, in ritual. Picture a state funeral, Jack. It is all precision, detail, order, design. The nation holds its breath. - (WN 292)

Off-camera lives are unverifiable.

In cities no one notices specific dying. Dying is a quality of the air. It's everywhere and nowhere.

What you see is not what we see. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.

We surrounded ourselves with smoke and loud noise. That's the way we chose to live. I'm prepared to defend it.