It all began, I suppose, with learning to build fire—to warm the cave and keep the predators out. And it ended with time-release Valium. - Walter Tevis

I have read over a hundred books. And I have played, over and over, recordings of the symphonies of Mozart and Brahms and Prokofiev and Beethoven, and chamber music, and operettas, and various musical works by Bach and Sibelius and Dolly Parton and Palestrina and Lennon. This music sometimes, even more than the books, enlarges my sense of the past.

I was not as awed by Rules as I had once been.

The woman stared at me. “You don’t know a church of the living God when you see one?”
I looked around me, at the aisles covered with plastic-sealed merchandise, at the racks of colored clothing and electronic equipment and rifles and golf clubs and jackets. “But this is no church,” I said. “This is a store.”