“What's a mediator you ask? Oh, a person who acts as a liason between the living and the dead. Hey, wait a minute… what're you doing with that strait jacket?-Suze Simon's imagination”

“Jack: Hey, wait a minute. What kind of make up is this?”

“How do you do that?” Mennis asked, frowning.
“What?”
“Smile so much.”
“Oh, I’m just a happy person.”

“Once you know yourself, then you do not need a mediator between you and God.”

“In dreams you are so 'dumb' that you believe there is a commerce between the living and the dead. You are so 'irrational' as to imagine that you sometimes speak to parents who are dead. You are so 'unrealistic' that it seems to you that you visit old houses, long ago torn down, or that you travel in exotic foreign cities that you have actually never visited. In dreams you are so 'insane' you do not feel yourself locked in a closet of time and space, but feel instead as if all infinity but waited your beckoning.”

“It's just, like, a total catastrophe, the unemployment rates, everything is bad — no health care, no education, no anything, no anything. And poverty is unbelievable. Then, I said, ‘Hey, wait a minute, vote for me. What have you got to lose? You can't do worse, you can't do any worse than what these people have been doing and I will do better.”

“You crawl over the onrushing piano passages in slow motion. Your fingers are in ten little steel strait-jackets….”

“I do not ask you about the dead past. I bring you to the living present.”

“Do you know what happened to the last person who took that tone with me? (Xypher)
Let me guess…Disembowelment. Probably painful. Definitely slow. (Simone)”

“And what happens then?
When?
After you're dead.
Dont nothing happen. You're dead.
You told me once you believed in God.
The old man waved his hand. Maybe, he said. I got no reason to think he believes in me. Oh I'd like to see him for a minute if I could.
What would you say to him?
Well, I think I'd just tell him. I'd say: Wait a minute. Wait just one minute before you start in on me. Before you say anything, there's just one thing I'd like to know. And he'll say: what's that? And then I'm goin to ast him: What did you have me in that crapgame down there for anyway? I couldnt put any part of it together.
Suttree smiled. What do you think he'll say?
The ragpicker spat and wiped his mouth. I dont believe he can answer it. I dont believe there is an answer.”