He threw another tray, and could I not smile while I worked, it made him crazy, he said, throwing a third tray, it made him crazy to see my teeth and my eyebrows, he could tell the difference between a real smile and a fake one, and he could see that my smile was real, and if it had been fake he could have tolerated it, but he could imagine nothing

I wondered why Aunt Liz had set me up with a job working at the fast-food place, I wondered why she hadn’t set me up with a job as a therapist. I have always been an amateur at talking and listening, but how hard could it be to turn professional, there wasn’t any equipment involved.

There were signs on everything, there were signs on the trees, there were enormous billboards, shop signs, there was writing everywhere. My gift has always been gab, but even if I was a stronger reader I couldn’t imagine reading all of those signs, it was like driving through a crazy book, it would take a hundred years to read it all.

I imagined a bus with no windshield and no back window, the bugs could pass straight through.

I don’t need to tell you that I can be a slow absorber, I’ve always been a slow absorber, but it’s better than the opposite, your grandfather used to say, which is to be a quick absorber, or sucker.

I asked the driver what had happened, maybe I had missed something. He shrugged and said, Random. At which point my mind returned to Paul Renfro, I wished Paul was sitting next to me, making a mess of his papers, Paul would have given the driver a piece of his mind, as they say. The word random is a white flag of surrender, Paul’s philosophy, for

Paul explained that nonthinkers, those who weren’t going to move history forward in any way, those who preferred to let others do their thinking for them, loved the term slippery slope, he explained that slippery slope was a favorite term among those who wanted to erase distinctions between discrete things in order to better control those around

When JB talked about being a conduit, he talked about being a conduit for God, but he was in fact a conduit for Scott Valdez.

In his ideal world, everyone knew all the films he knew, and they communicated only by using lines from films. With each line came implications and shades of mood and meaning, all perfectly communicated from one person to another. In his ideal world, he would hardly have to talk, he would only have to quote.