What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation.

I was living, in short, on the edge of a landscape of vast shame.

“That’s what it all comes down to in the end,” he said. “A person spends his life saying good-bye to other people. How does he say good-bye to himself?”

“Helpless and fearful people are drawn to magical figures, mythic figures, epic men who intimidate and darkly loom.”

This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature.”

I liked to watch Orest eat. He inhaled food according to aerodynamic principles. Pressure differences, intake velocities.

“I got myself a combat magnum parked near my bed. I hate to tell you what mischief it can cause with the placement of a man’s features.”

It was a habit of his, letting the ash dangle. Babette thought he did it to induce feelings of suspense and anxiety in others. It was part of the reckless weather in which he moved.

What an epic force he must have seemed to her, taking shape in her kitchen this way, a parent, a father with all the grist of years on him, the whole dense history of associations and connections, come to remind her who she was, to remove her disguise, grab hold of her maundering life for a time, without warning.