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"A man of many artificial parts was Lawyer Frank Tull. His teeth had been fashioned for him and fitted to his jaws by a doctor of dental surgery. His eyes, weak and wretched, saw the world through bifocal lenses, so distorted that only through them could the distortion of Frank's own eyes perceive things aright. He had a silver plate in his skull to guard a hole from which a brain tumor had been removed. One of his legs was made of metal and fiber; it took the place of the flesh-and-blood leg his mother had given him in her womb. Around his belly was an apparatus that fitted mouth-like over his double hernia and prevented his guts from falling out. A suspensory kept his scrotum from dangling unduly. In his left arm a platinum wire took the place of the humerus. Once every alternating week he went to the clinic and was injected either with salvarsan or mercury according to the antepenultimate week's dose to prevent the Spirochaeta pallida from holding too much power over his soul. Odd times he suffered prostate massages and subjected himself to deep irrigations to rectify another chronic fault in his machinery. Now and then, to keep his good one going, they flattened his rotten lung with gas. On one ear was strapped an arrangement designed to make ordinary sounds more audible. In the shoe of his good foot an arch supported kept that foot from splaying out. A wig covered the silver plate in his skull. His tonsils had been taken from him, and so had his appendix and his adenoids. Stones had been carved from his gall, and a cancer burnt from his nose. His piles had been removed, and water had been drained from his knee. Sometimes they fed him with enemas; and they punched a hole in his throat so he could breathe when his noseholes clogged. He carried a steel brace, for his neck was broken; currently also his toenails ingrew. As a member of the finest species life had yet produced he could not wrest a living from the plants of the field, nor could he compete with the beasts thereof. As a member of the society into which he had been born he was respected and taken care of and lived on, surviving, no doubt, because he was fit. He was a husband but not a father, a married man but not a lover. One hundred years after he died they opened his coffin. All they found were strings and wires" (75-76).

- Charles G. Finney in The Circus of Dr. Lao (ISBN: 0-8032-6907-2)

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"The building around us was quiet, deathly quiet, and outside my window the night was like a dark nullification of the existence of the city. But underneath night's skirts the city lived on. Disconnected creatures passed through the blackness, towards solitary destinations, lonely hotel rooms, appointments with death. Nobody ever stopped the creatures to ask them where they were going—no one wanted to know. No one but me, the creature who asked questions, the lowest creature of them all. I was stupid enough to think there was something wrong with the silence that had fallen like a gloved hand onto the bare throat of the city" (134).

- Jonathan Lethem in Gun, With Occasional Music (ISBN: 0-15-602897-2)

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"But the end's always at the end; in the meantime there's the meantime" (52).

- Cynthia Ozick in "Shots" from Levitation (ISBN: 0-8156-0353-3)

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"The simpler and perhaps deeper, truth lies in the comparison more obvious to others: that the empires of data storage make up a castle or hermit-crab's shell for my tender self. My exoskeleton of books has peaked in baroque outcroppings and disorderly excess at times of lonely crisis. After my mother died I acquired a friend's vast paperback collection, and the overflow shelving in my other room consisted of books balanced on planks unfixed to any wall or support, so that no one apart from me dared lift a book for fear of calamity. Between marriages I've reached such fevers of acquisition that I twice resorted to sleeping on mattresses laid not atop a box spring but a pallet of cartons, the only way to disguise the excess without resorting to storage. Moving books off-site would have felt like putting my arms and legs in hock" (147).

- Jonathan Lethem in “The Beards” from The Disappointment Artist (ISBN: 0-385-51217-1)

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"We're all of us students and teachers, stranded in the breach between the violently solitary and elitist necessities of High Art—exemplified, in our time, by professional Bartlebys of the William Gass or Cynthia Ozick type—and the Horatio Alger wishfulness of so much writing advice, the self-actualizing egalitarianism of Writer's Digest. Yet faced with this ubiquitous hunger even to be allowed the attempt to make oneself a writer—so human and poignant, so profoundly benign—what does it mean to install a [Edward] Dahlberg in a classroom and permit him to mall a [Wilma] Yeo? What's the value of the dissident writer, one who exiles himself from contemporaries, audience, and apprentices, in the cultural marketplace? Why do we—why did my aunt—seem to cherish our brushes with Dahlbergs, even as we encourage their victims to complain them out of the profession" (26-27)?

- Jonathan Lethem in "The Disappointment Artist" from the essay book of the same name (ISBN: 0-385-51217-1)

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"So, though I collected words, treasured them like a drooling sadistic captor, bending them, melting them down, filing off their edges, stacking them into teetering piles, before release I translated them into physical performance, manic choreography" (47).

- Jonathan Lethem in Motherless Brooklyn (ISBN: 0-571-20316-7)

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“Every song was the worst way I could think of to ask for what I did not yet know how not to want” (32).

- Garielle Lutz in "Their Sizes Run Differently" from The Complete Gary Lutz (ISBN-13: 978-1733535915)

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"All observed experience, I was convinced, was useful; difficult experiences, if they were fully apprehended, could smelt forth something significant from the dross of life. I was interested in giving readers an experience devoid of conventional mediation, and I saw the story as a catalyst whose effect and whose success would be determined by the reader's ability to interact with it" (271).

— Brian Evenson in the Afterword to Altmann's Tongue (ISBN: 0-8032-6744-4)