'Together we are formidable.' 'And on occasion, ill-mannered too,' I said, smiling. 'On occasion,' my sister conceded. 'But only under provocation.'

'We fell in love and it was like . . . you know when all of a sudden there's meaning. Actual true meaning and purpose.' 'Like color in the dark,' Patch said. 'Yes. Exactly yes. Nothing is so dark with them in the world.'

All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself, and this is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try, as it were, to crawl under the net.

And now it is almost midnight, the moment when the page of night turns over into day. Almost midnight, the hour when the figure of Death strikes the golden bell of the clock. And what will happen when the clock strikes? Your face announces that you know. Be patient; let us see if you do.

Arvin didn't know which was worse, the drinking or the praying. As far back as he could remember, it seemed that his father had fought the Devil all the time.

He looked up. The stars, he thought, had been watching him his whole life. They'd seen the whole thing go on and on. Him and the rest of all the people who had ever lived and ever would. It was like living in a museum exhibit or a dollhouse. It was so easy to imagine the hands of some enormous and indifferent God prying the house open and squinting at them as they went about their lives on their circuits like little automatons in an exhibit called The Late Americans. A God with a Gorgon's head peering down in judgment. What were you supposed to do in the face of that? Turn to stone? Fuck. He mattered so little.