There was a sort of irony in the fact that these [superhero] characters - many of whom in that period, the Golden Age, had been evolved to fight the Nazis - were themselves very much in the Nazi ideal. The idea that you can solve problems through physical strength, by being stronger and more dominant and more powerful - that is fascism. I mean, that's it, that's the essence of fascism. I don't think the creators of the superheroes or the kids who were reading them at the time were the slightest bit aware of it.

The instructor, Ms. Pease, also taught in the church's religious school, and she had a Sunday school manner at once saccharine and condemnatory.

Fathering imposed an obligation that was more than your money, your body, or your time, a presence neither physical nor measurable by clocks: open-ended, eternal, and invisible, like the commitment of gravity to the stars.

He looked so profoundly disappointed in me that I wondered for a moment if he was someone I knew.

The fundamental truth: a baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day.

I have confused ideas of deity, heavily influenced by mind-altering years of reading science fiction, that do not often trouble me, but one thing I know for certain, and have known since the age of five or six, is that I really can't stand the God of Abraham. In fact, I consider him to constitute the pattern to which every true asshole I have ever known in my life has pretty well conformed.

He comes to this other world and he has to reinvent himself. Again, it felt natural, even though I'd been working really hard trying to come up with something.