“My God, the corruptions of literature. It put all these notions into our heads.”

“Literature is not an instruction manual.”

“Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream.”

“You know, there's something heartsick about parties like this. Look at us. We're all pretending to be smart, as if intelligence were the cure for our anguish.”

“Their imaginations put the scene on a film loop. Guiltily, they watched it until their mental screens began to wash the rest of the past away.”

“I felt as though I were in the presence of one of God's more complicated pranks.”

“The problem with love and God, the two of them, is how to say anything about them that doesn’t annihilate them instantly with the wrong words, with untruth. . . . In this sense, love and God are equivalents. We feel both, but because we cannot speak clearly about them, we end up–wordless, inarticulate—by denying their existence altogether, and, pfffffft, they die.”