No buildings on the National Resister of Hysterical Places, though there are some old houses, the oldest of which finally collapses on page 141; no cheating ahead to watch it slump like ice cream at noon, please.
-- Narrator (Part I, 1 paragraph 7)

Importance: Significant in this quote is the way the narrator speaks directly to the reader about the book as he requests the reader not look ahead to a reference he makes to something coming up in the novel. Note the colloquial use of the reference to the National Register of Hysterical Places instead its formal title of the National Register of Historical Places. The quote also includes a simile, a literary device used often throughout the course of the novel, as the author describes a house as slumping like ice cream at noon.

But we also are prey to what I might call a vast and overweening ambition. I mean, really, to preserve history, collect...
-- Worried Man (Part I, 1 paragraph 51)