Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.

Shortridge High School was an elitist high school. In a way it was a scandal because you could go there no matter where you lived, if you could get there. It was for over-achievers. It was for people who were going to college. So we were very special and we were hated for being ritzy.

People who are wary of what they might find in a book if they opened one are right to be.

There is no good reason good can't triumph over evil, if only angels will get organized along the lines of the mafia.

Comedians and jazz musicians have been more comforting and enlightening to me than preachers or politicians or philosophers or poets or painters or novelists of my time. Historians in the future, in my opinion, will congratulate us on very little other than our clowning and our jazz.

It shook up Trout to realize that even he could bring evil into the world — in the form of bad ideas.

Oh, God — the lives people try to lead. Oh, God — what a world they try to lead them in.