All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard.

... all this talking, this rather liquid confessing, was something I didn't think I could ever bring myself to do. It seemed foolhardy to me, like an uncooked egg deciding to to come out of its shell: there would be a risk of spreading out too far, turning into a formless puddle.

Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.

She knows herself to be at the mercy of events, and she knows by now that events have no mercy.

Younger people have greatest fears. Why is that? Because they don't know the plot. They don't know their own individual plot... they don't know what's going to happen to them.

There's more private security in the United States than there are publicly funded forces, like police. What you don't want is a meld of government and commerce - you really want to keep those two things separate - because once you have that meld, you've got megacorruption, and you have no third force to whom you can say this stuff is poisoning our kids.

There's something final about saying you were married once. It's like saying you were dead once. It shuts them up.