It was possible at last to hear the silence to appreciate that there was a silence, deep and potent, out there beyond the pretension of the light.

It was the kind of experience, Molly said, that would grow calluses on an angel's ass.

Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere.

Along with a dozen other students I had dissected a human cadaver and sorted its contents by size, color, function, and weight. There was nothing pleasant about the experience. Its only consolation was its truth and its only virtue was its utility.

We're all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we're seldom formally introduced.

The conversation was mesmerizing, not for its content but for the cadences of the talk, the rhythm we fell into when we were alone, now as before. Every conversation between friends or lovers creates its own easy or awkward rhythms, hidden talk that runs like a subterranean river under even the most banal exchange.

[There was] only one news channel, overseen by a bland and complexly multicultural board of advisors. It broadcast in fifteen languages and was, as a rule, interesting in none of them.