The bridge, behind him now, perhaps forever, is a medium of transport — Bridge trilogy

"The women wore clothes Chevette had only seen in magazines. Rich people, had to be, and foreign, too. Though maybe rich was foreign enough."

"They’d been putting condos into the shell of this big old Safeway out on Jefferson Davis. The architects wanted the cinder block walls stripped just this one certain way…They were from Memphis and they wore black suits and white cotton shirts…Rydell had figured that that was a way for architects to dress; now he lived in L.A., he knew it was true. He’d overheard one of them explaining to the foreman that what they were doing was exposing the integrity of the material’s passage through time. He thought that was probably bullshit, but he sort of liked the sound of it anyway; like what happened to old people on television."

"Sublett was Texan, a refugee from some weird trailer-camp video-sect…these people figured video was the Lord’s preferred means of communicating, the screen itself a kind of perpetually burning bush. Whatever form this worship had taken, it was evident that Sublett had absorbed more television than anyone Rydell had ever met."

"Was it significant that Skinner shared his dwelling with one who earned her living at the archaic intersection of information and geography? The offices the girl rode between were electronically conterminous—in effect, a single desktop, the map of distances obliterated by the seamless and instantaneous nature of communication. Yet this very seamlessness, which had rendered physical mail an expensive novelty, might as easily be viewed as porosity, and as such created the need for the service the girl provided. Physically transporting bits of information about a grid that consisted of little else, she provided a degree of absolute security in the fluid universe of data. With your memo in the girl’s bag, you knew precisely where it was; otherwise, your memo was nowhere, perhaps everywhere, in that instant of transit."

"“Jesus, Berry, you shouldn’t oughta watch TV, not unless you’re gonna pay it attention.”"

"Fontaine knows the bridge is burning when he looks out and sees a rat streak past, toward Oakland. Then another, and a third. Rats know, and the bridge rats are held to be most knowing of all, through having been hunted so thoroughly by the bridges host of feral cats and by innumerable equally feral children armed with slingshots cobbled from aircraft aluminum and surgical tubing."