The waitress brought me another drink. She wanted to light my hurricane lamp again. I wouldn't let her. "Can you see anything in the dark, with your sunglasses on?" she asked me. "The big show is inside my head," I said.

Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

The champagne was dead. So it goes.

How complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.

That was what made them so hilarious and unafraid. That was the strength of the Nazis. [...] They understood God better than anyone. They knew how to make Him stay away.

We were German-Americans in a British colony, so we were outsiders.

The surface of Earth heaved and seethed in fecund restlessness. Earth was most fertile where the most death was.