"My father took one look at me when I was born and must have thought I had the face of someone dignified and sad like an old-fashioned queen or a dead person..." (1).

"...some is just starting to bloom in an acidy yellow color which Edmond says is rape as in rapeseed oil but the only kind of rape I know is the kind you read about in the paper ten times a day and always ignore unless the rapist turns out to be a priest or someone on TV," (8).

"...all it said was NO NETWORK and I thought Oh boy so much for civilization and felt a little freaked out and thought of that movie where they say No One Can Hear You Scream," (10).

"...so far I was finding Life With My Cousins more than OK and a huge improvement over my so-called life at home on Eighty-sixth Street," (16).

"...the moment she left was exactly the moment we all started skewing off into crisis like how Archduke Ferdinand getting killed started WWI even though the connection, to me at least, was never that clear," (24).

"...a shoe store that also sold raincoats and waterproof boots and footballs and penny candy and Tweety Bird backpacks," (26).

"...don't look now but there's a Smurf with a hard-on in your pants," (33).

"It turns out to be true that an Object in Motion Remains in Motion. Well than you, Miss Valerie Greene, science teacher badk at dear old Nightingale-Bamford School for Girls," (47).

"From my point of view this made any doomsday scenario even harder to get my head around, especially having grown up in the Concrete Jungle, which possibly overstates the case given that the Upper West Side is fairly leafy, as concrete jungles go," (52).

"It was getting to be like Walt Disney on Ecstasy outside the house what with squirrels and hedgehogs and deer wandering around with ducks and dogs and chickens and goats and sheep and if anyone looked totally disoriented by this whole war thing it was them," (53).

"...all I could think was this would not happen in America but of course for all I knew the Green Berets were already holed up in Bloomingdale's," (66).

"...but do you know anyone, even in the middle of a war, who's going to take on a group of five kids especially ones like us who don't exactly remind you of Little Women even on our best day?" (67).

"...I figured we'd gone about fifteen or twenty miles by the time we got where we were going, what with speed divided by time equaling four birds in a tree singing Melancholy Baby," (73).

"...I had to squint and think of Piper to keep my fake smile from turning into something more like Jason in Friday the 13th," (74).

"...the closest you ever got to Agricultural Produce was a corned beef sandwich from Zabar's..." (85).

"All in all I felt a little guilty about the fact that while us kids had been living the Life of Riley, a whole bunch of other people had been scurrying aorund like lunatics trying to keep the Social Fabric from Unraveling..." (87).

"Strange as it sounds, he visited me, not exactly like god visiting Moses or angels telling mary she's knocked up with the Christ Child, but come to think of it not cocmpletely unlike that either," (89).

"...I wouldn't have recognized a hazelnut if it tapped me on the shoulder and asked me how to get to Carnegie Hall..." (124).

"I felt full of rage and despair, like Job shaking his fist at god, and all I could do was sit whith her and stroke her hair and murmur enough, enough, because that's what we'd both had," (154).

"...I settled for Old Faithful," (156).

"What we really needed was a huge Amana refrigerator-freezer with ice maker and root beer dispenser," (159).

"I tried doing the thing they do with dogs in the movies, saying JET FETCH EDMOND! and pointing in the general direction of th Wide World but he didn't bound off like Lassie follwoing a hot scent..." (160).

"...I moved into a derelict office building near what used to be Grand Central," (170).

"Around the corner was The New york Public Library, Main Branch, Forty-second and Fifth," (171).