some mornings... I sit at the kitchen table shaking salt into the hairs on my arm, and a feeling shoves up in me: it's finished. Everything went past without me.

He looks tired, like someone walked on his skin and left footprints.

Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?” Scotty shook his head. “The goon won.

Her only thought was of getting away, as if she were carrying a live grenade from inside the house, so that when it exploded, it would destroy just herself.

There are so many ways to go wrong. All we've got are metaphors, and they're never exactly right. You can never just Say. The. Thing.

I felt more doubtful than usual with 'Goon Squad,' because I knew that the book's genre wasn't easily named - Novel? Stories? Novel-in-stories? - and I worried that its lack of a clear category would count against it. My hopes for it were pretty modest.

Real computers scared me; if you can find Them, then They can find you.