“How few days are left in the lives of anyone. How few hours.”

“How do you make love to someone when you know they’ll be gone forever the next day? How do you spend the last few hours with someone when you know there will never beanything after that?”

“So am I dead? How many kinds of living and dead and living dead and dead living had I been in just these few months, these few days, after the stasis of plain old human living and dying? I deserved some kind of existential medal.”

“Of erections how few are domed like St. Peter's! of creatures, how few vast as the whale!”

“I thought about all the people I knew who spent many of their waking hours feeling sorry for themselves. How useful it would be to put a daily limit on self-pity. Just a few tearful minutes, then on with the day.”

“The passion of being forever with one's fellows, and the fear of being left for a few hours alone, is to me wholly incomprehensible.”