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1 " What you believe matters, however. It’s all anyone has to act on. And since what you do is who you are, your actions define you. If you don’t believe anything is true simply because you can’t logically prove what’s true, you won’t do anything. You won’t be anything. You’ll end up spending your life in a rocking chair looking out at the horizon waiting for an answer that never comes. You might as well be dead. It’s an old philosophical problem. "
― Russell Banks , Lost Memory of Skin
2 " Boys like it when you talk to them as if they were grown men—at least he always did when he was a kid—because they pretend that’s what they are anyhow, grown-up men, and they do it for their entire lives. "
3 " Secrets and lies, they eat your insides until all you have left is a hard thin skin that covers you like the shell of one of those eggs you poke a little hole in and draw out its eggy contents before you dye it for Easter. "
4 " He can’t quite picture God except as a huge ball of light with an old man’s deep voice like in the pickup truck ads on TV coming out of the ball of light dictating the way everything in Eden is supposed to work. "
5 " The Cop. She has a steel grid in front of her mind, and for anything in the outer world to reach her it first has to squeeze through the bars of that grid. Information has to be broken into small cubes; information and data packaged in two-dimensional squares are preferable to three-dimensional cubes however: they pass through the grid more quickly and once they reach the Cop’s mind take up less space there. "
6 " We all have our little secrets, no? And we all tell little lies, sometimes for innocent reasons. To make friends, for instance, or to avoid embarrassment. Or just to keep things simple. Sometimes the truth is too complicated to pass along in a short conversation or interview. And sometimes it’s just irrelevant. "
7 " That’s why his hands were trembling as he lighted another cigarette. He was about to bump up against and break through an invisible membrane between the perfectly controlled world locked inside his head and the endlessly overflowing unpredictable, dangerous world outside. "
8 " The wind is shifting gradually around to the north and the rain has intensified. It’s nearly dawn when he crosses the state line into Alabama, and finally it enters his mind that a hurricane has come in off the Gulf and he has been driving straight through it for the last several hours. "
