Fiction that isn't an author's personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn't worth writing for anything but money.

The world was ending then, it's ending still, and I'm happy to belong to it again.

I admire your capacity for admiring.

But she was seventeen now and not actually dumb. She knew that you could love somebody more than anything and still not love the person all that much, if you were busy with other things.

The Mekons were kind of like the background music of my life.

You encountered a misery near the end of the day and it took a while to gauge its full extent. Some miseries had sharp curvature and could be negotiated readily. Others had almost no curvature and you knew you'd be spending hours turning the corner. Great whopping-big planet-sized miseries.

Everything he did was at least partial and often total bullshit” (402).