We all love after-the-bomb stories. If we didn’t, why would there be so many of them? There’s something attractive about all those people being gone, about wandering in a depopulated world, scrounging cans of Campbell’s pork and beans, defending one’s family from marauders. But some secret part of us thinks it would be good to survive. All those other folks will die. That’s what after-the-bomb stories are all about.

Such a lexicon of tactics.

They eat the sewage that floats on the surface of the mass culture, digest it, and then get creative diarrhea – all at once. The turd look and smell exactly alike, and we call them this year’s fashions, hit shows, books, and movies.

She knew for a fact, for instance, that what the Polo sisters did behind the closed doors of their adjoining rooms was still illegal in Alabama.

All in all, it was the goldarndest, Barnum-and-Baileyest, rib-stickinest, rough-and-tumblest infernal foofaraw of a media circus anybody had seen since grandpaw chased the possum down the road and lost his store teeth, and I was heartily sorry to have been a part of it.

Draw your own moral from this, Sparky. And remember at the center of the cult of personality called stardom there is just a big empty hole. Awards don’t matter. Acclaim doesn’t matter. Only your craft matters.

Bill’s tongue had started at Cirocco’s toes and was now exploring her left ear. She liked that. It had been a memorable journey.

How heavy is that day in the mountains when you built a campfire and saw a shooting star? What is the mass of yesterday? How fast is love?

Will have been! A truly stratospheric verb.

There were millions of Earth men and women who bought the Earth cultures big lies, and they died just as unhappy as you are now. And I suggest to you that it’s a foolish thing.