“She wanted only tall smooth bottles whose labels spoke of Proof.”

“sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.”

“-the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.”

“She would- never mind. She was his servant. Slave mentality. This was not the girl I asked to marry me. She was his slave and believed she knew only joy...where was my wife? What was this creature she stroked and sucked at...”

“...the only real significance she had attached to the memory was that it was funny what stuck with you.”

“I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.”

“In a nation whose great informing myth is that it has no great informing myth, familiarity equaled timelessness”