“How totally unexpected," he declared, then proceeded to faint from blood loss.”

“So this is how life was, she thought with a faint smile: It wore you down until you emerged at its wildest, most unexpected ends.”

“It was like that. Sometimes I'd go for a period—days or weeks—without feeling the full sweep of my loss, and then as unexpected as a thunderclap, the realization would rip the protective coating from my senses. Maybe that's the way it is with trick knees and aging griefs. Totally pain free one moment and absorbingly painful the next.”

“In 1964 something totally unexpected happened.I got a job I enjoyed.”

“The waves, the girl in the rain, and that awful, blood-begotten stom. Blood and love and loss.”

“He who does not know how to encircle a girl so that she loses sight of everything he does not want her to see, he who does not know how to poetize himself into a girl so that it is from her that everything proceeds as he wants it-he is and remains a bungler”