He opened another beer, and I warmed some canned chili on the stove. P — Scott Bradfield

"You know what Christmas means? It means if I love you, Im going to buy you a whole load of crap. The more I love you, the bigger the load gets. Sometimes, if you can afford it, you can get your loved one literally tons of crap, and then theyre really loved. Love, love, love. Ho ho ho. Merry Christmas. Buy some more crap. Come on, line up and buy yourselves a whole lot more crap. Heres something nice. Bought any crap quite like this crap recently? Crap crap crap. Ho ho ho. Like that mechanical Santa Claus in the Montgomery Wards window display. Ho ho ho. Merry Christmas, everybody. Have yourselves all one fucking hell of a merry little Christmas, all you poor stupid saps. Line up and get taken, thats what I say, thats what Santa says. We take MasterCard cards and Visa cards. Come on, losers. Line up on this side. Get your money taken on that side."

"Sometimes I dont know," Rodney said, wiping his brow with the back of his greasy hand. "Sometimes I dont know if I was born mean, or if the world just made me that way."

"I turned. The schoolground seemed to be glowing. It wasnt like night so much as like night on some high-tech movie set. Invisible machines operated everywhere. Hidden technicians monitored, taped, replayed and edited. Truth could be collapsed and disarranged. Life was not fact, but montage. I might even be an actor playing somebody elses role. My mind might be a stage upon which some cultural drama played."

"The body, I have often thought, is like a promise. You keep things in it. Those things are covert, immediate, yours. There is something lustrous about them. They emit energy, like radium or appliances. They can be replaced, repaired or simply discarded. The promise of the body is very firm and intact. Its the only promise we can count on, and we cant really count on it very much."