In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real.

What scared me the most was when my father would put on the gasmask. His face would disappear... This was not a human being at all.

I will never fully understand; that is the nature of such creatures. Or is this Inner Truth now, this that is happening to me? I will wait. I will see. Which it is. Perhaps it is both.

Upon him the contempt of three planets descended.

When I was a child, I thought as a child. But now I have put away childish things. ... I must be scientific.

In one of the most brilliant papers in the English language Hume made it clear that what we speak of as 'causality' is nothing more than the phenomenon of repetition. When we mix sulphur with saltpeter and charcoal we always get gunpowder. This is true of every event subsumed by a causal law in other words, everything which can be called scientific knowledge. "It is custom which rules ," Hume said, and in that one sentence undermined both science and philosophy .

Basically, Sherri's idea had to do with bringing Fat's mind down from the cosmic and the abstract to the particular. She had hatched out the practical notion that nothing is more real than a large World War Two Soviet tank.