“Historical Slumming: The act of visiting locations such as diners, smokestack industrial sites, rural village -- locations where time appears to have been frozen many years back -- so as to experience relief when one returns back to “the present.””

“There's a smokestack on the back of every government program.”

“Jane leaned back against the counter and stared at the ceiling. At the traditional location of God, no matter what the planet.”

“The geographic center of North America is historically located in Osborne County, Kansas. It is said that all armies will bow to the one who controls it.”

“In real estate it is all about location, location, location. In business it is differentiate, differentiate, differentiate.”

“It was obvious there would be no return to "normality." The economy wouldn't be coming back. Globalism was over. The politicians and generals were failing to pull things together at the center. We would not be returning to Boston. The computer industry, in which so many hopes had been vested, was fading into history.”

“China has been long one of the richest, that is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious, and most populous countries in the world. It seems, however, to have been long stationary. Marco Polo, who visited it more than five hundred years ago, describes its cultivation, industry, and populousness, almost in the same terms in which they are described by travellers in the present times.”

“The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.”

“Lately, I have been having nightmares, where I'm cut into so many pieces that there isn't enough of me to be put back together.”

“For twenty years I have ached to go back home, when there was nobody there to whom I could return.”