I felt more solidly composed, now that I was horizontal. I was impossible to knock down.

We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately (...) To games or needles, to some other person.

This is why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the questions 'why' and 'to what' grow real beaks and claws.

Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.

Hell hath no fury like a coolly received postmodernist.

Eyes the broad-shouldered faceless character that symbolizes Men’s Room, does Sternberg, and struggles with himself. He’s needed a bowel movement for hours, and since the LordAloft 7:10 lifted things have gotten critical. He tried, back at O’Hare. But he was unable to, because he was afraid to, afraid that Mark, who has the look of someone who never just has to, might enter the rest room and see Sternberg’s shoes under a stall door and know that he, Sternberg, was having a bowel movement in that stall, infer that Sternberg had bowels, and thus organs, and thus a body. Like many Americans of his generation in this awkwardest of post-Imperial decades, an age suspended between exhaustion and replenishment, between input too ordinary to process and input too intense to bear, Sternberg is deeply ambivalent about being embodied; an informing fear that, were he really just an organism, he’d be nothing more than an ism of his organs.