“Isabel turns down Oak toward the little vintage shop at Fourth Avenue, thinking of lunch—the Chinese place in Old Town, casting around inside herself for hunger, imagining the tastes of things.”

“Darashikoh was inside, for all the world a tastefully dressed patron of the shop, but he carried death in his undershorts and hunger in his heart.”

“For lunches he rode the elevator to the fourth-floor food court and ate Thai Town or Subway at a table tucked among potted tropicals, gazing past milling teenagers to the little penny-choked fountain where a copper salmon spat water into a chlorinated pool.”

“The little girl skipped by under the wrinkled oak leaves and held fast to a replica of herself.”

“Stencil had called from a Hungarian coffee shop on York Avenue known as Hungarian Coffee Shop”

“This can shake you up, this business of things almost but not quite being the same. A pharmacy is not quite a drugstore; a brasserie is not quite a coffee shop; a lunch is not quite a lunch.”