"I called it "Zero History" because one of the characters has had a missing decade, during which he paid no taxes and had no credit cards. He meets a federal agent, who tells him that that combination indicates to her that he hasn’t been up to much good, the past ten years…Events find him, and he starts to acquire a history. And, one assumes, a credit rating, and the need to pay taxes. It’s also the first book I’ve written in which anyone gets engaged to be married."
"You can do sneaky-ass," Winnie said, "Instinct tells me. Whose phone are you using?…I just e-mailed the number to someone, and they’re telling me the GPS is very amusing. Unless you’ve taken up marathon randomized teleportation.”"
"Shorts, she thinks, drawing abreast of this trio, are somehow always wrong in London."
"But Cayce sees that there is a Michelin Man within her field of vision, its white, bloated, maggot−like form perched on the edge of a dealers counter, about thirty feet away. It is about two feet tall, and is probably meant to be illuminated from within. The Michelin Man was the first trademark to which she exhibited a phobic reaction. She had been six."
"She finds the Childrens Crusade just as she remembers it. Damiens expression for what descends on Camden Town on a Saturday, this shuffling lemming-jam of young people…Cayce has spent hours here, escorting the creative executives of the worlds leading athletic-shoe companies through the ambulatory forest of the feet that have made their fortunes, and hours more alone, looking for little jolts of pure street fashion to e-mail home."
"You follow the footage." His eyes narrowing… Damien maintains, half−seriously, that followers of the footage comprise the first true freemasonry of the new century."
"There were ghosts in the Civil War trees, past Philadelphia."