“JAY: No really. Be secure. Pretend I'm a sperm cell. Here. I take the string out of the... hood of my sweatshirt, affix it to my behind for a tail, like so...LENORE: What in God's name are you doing?JAY: Pretend, Lenore. Be an ovum. Be strong. Let me hypothetically batter at you. Batter batter. Surrender to the unreal of the real interior.LENORE: Are you supposed to be a sperm, wriggling your sweatshirt-string like that?JAY: I can feel the strength of your membrane, Lenore.”

“Mr. Bloemker moved closer. He smelled like a wet diaper. “What is it,” he asked, looking over Lenore’s shoulder.“If it’s what I think it is,” said Lenore, “it’s a sort of joke. A what do you call it. An antinomy.”“An antinomy?”Lenore nodded. “Gramma really likes antinomies. I think this guy here,” looking down at the drawing on the back of the label, “is the barber who shaves all and only those who do not shave themselves.”Mr. Bloemker looked at her. “A barber?”“The big killer question,” Lenore said to the sheet of paper, “is supposed to be whether the barber shaves himself. I think that’s why his head’s exploded, here.”“Beg pardon?”“If he does, he doesn’t, and if he doesn’t, he does.”

“I cannot say what color Lenore Beadsman’s eyes are; I cannot look at them; they are the sun to me.”

“Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.”

“He said he didn’t think Lenore should go to the G.O.D."Nobody ever finds anybody in a place like that," he said, "People don’t go to a place like that to look for other people. That’s the opposite of the whole concept that’s behind the thing.”

“Te quiero, Lenore. No hay odio en lo que siento por ti. Únicamente la tristeza intensa que me provoca mi incapacidad para explicarlo o describirlo”

“A nurse’s aid threw the contents of a patient’s water glass out a window, the mass of water hitting the ground dislodging a pebble which rolled across the angled pavement and fell with a click on a stone culvert in the ditch below, startling a squirrel having at some sort of nut right there on the concrete pipe, causing the squirrel to run up the nearest tree, in doing which it disturbed a slender brittle branch and surprised a few nervous morning birds, of of which, preparatory to flight released a black-and-white glob of droppings, which glob fell neatly on the windshield of the tiny car of one Lenore Beadsman, just as she pulled into a parking space. Lenore got out of the car while birds flew away, making sounds.”