"Whatever men make," she says, "what they felt when they made it is there...Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into thi… - John Updike

Man is a mechanism for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.

What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?

She breathed that air he'd forgotten, of high-school loveliness, come uninvited to bloom in the shadow of railroad overpasses, alongside telephone poles, within earshot of highways with battered aluminum center strips, out of mothers gone to lard and fathers ground down by gray days of work and more work, in an America littered with bottlecaps and pull-tabs and pieces of broken muffler.

A company of believers is like a prison full of criminals; their intimacy and solidarity is based on what they can least justify about themselves.