“-Do you recognize suffering? -I hope I do. -Injustice? -Again, I hope I would. -Then you are a political man.”

“I guess that's the point of drinking, to take all the feelings and thoughts and morals away until you are just a body doing what a body will do.”

“But how do you ever know that you know a person?”

“I wanted to lay down my cloak so that her feet might not be sullied by the dirty snow, but of course I could not - not only for the seeming excess of the gesture, which might have frightened away any sane woman, but also for a D shear impracticality of doing so at continuous intervals.”

“I wonder this: If you take a woman and push her to the edge, how will she behave?”

“Odd, she thought, how intensely you knew a person, or thought you did, when you were in love - soaked, drenched in love - only to discover later that perhaps you didn't know that person quite as well as you had imagined. Or weren't quite as well known as you had hoped to be. In the beginning, a lover drank in every word and gesture and then tried to hold on to that intensity for as long as possible. But inevitable, if two people were together long enough, that intensity had to wane.”

“Sometimes I think that if it were possible to tell a story often enough to make the hurt ease up, to make the words slide down my arms and away from me like water, I would tell that story a thousand times.”