"All my friends with PalmPilots and cell phones, they’re always calling themselves and leaving reminders to themselves about what’s about to happen. We leave Post-it notes for ourselves. We go to that shop in the mall, the one where they engrave whatever shit you want on a silver-plated box or a fountain pen, and we get a reminder for every special event that life goes by too fast for us to remember. We buy those picture frames where you record a message on a sound chip. We videotape everything! Oh, and now there’s those digital cameras, so we can all email around our photos — this century’s equivalent of the boring vacation slide show. We organize and reorganize. We record and archive."

“The first step — especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money — the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.”

“That's how a scary story works. It echoes some ancient fear. It recreates some forgotten terror. Something we'd like to think we're grown beyond. But it can still scare us to tears. It's something you'd hoped was healed.”

“According to Mona, you shouldn't kill people, because that drives you away from humanity. In order to justify killing, you have to make the victim your enemy. To justify any crime, you have to make the victim your enemy.”

“Some stories, Mr.Whitter would say, you tell them and you use them up. Other stories, they use you up. p288”

“Doctor Sarah didn't start out by attacking and berating everybody who called her radio show," Mona says. "She used to have a little time slot and a little audience, and she seemed to really care about helping people.”

“You are permanent, but this life is not," Mr. Whittier would say. "You don't expect to visit an amusement park, then stay forever.”