“Over and over, all I had done was say, 'There, I've said it,' though it would leave me feeling only exposed, not unmasked.”

“The boss had a long list of reasons for letting me go--most of which, I am ashamed to admit, were generously understated. It's true, for instance, that I hogged the photocopier for hours on end and snapped at whoever politely--deferentially--inquired about how much longer I would be. I was intent on achieving definitively sooty, penumbral effects to ensure that copies looked like copies, and that, of course, took time. Some days I spent entire afternoons reproducing blank sheets of paper, ream after ream, to use instead of the "FROM THE DESK OF--" notepads the boss kept ordering for each of us.”

“I've been within an inch of my life.”

“They weren't hours, these classes; they weren't even forty-five minutes--they were "periods," which sounded to me as if they were each at once a little era and then the end you had to see decisively put to it.”

“Then came nights when, lying awake beside my final wife, I would spend too much time putting my finger on what was wrong. I was wearing the finger out. What was wrong was very simple. Sometimes her life and mine fell on the same day.”

“It was my mother who taught me the one worthwhile thing: when they ask if you like what you see in the mirror, pretend that what they mean is what's behind you--the shower curtain, the tile, the wallpaper, whatever's there.”

“Most days what I felt was this: the minute you put a first name and a last name together, you've got a pair of tusks coming right at you (i.e., Watch out, buddy). but on days when I didn't disapprove of everything on principle--days when the whole cologned, cuff-shooting ruck of my co-workers didn't repulse me from the moment they disembarked from the sixth-floor elevator and began squidging their way along the carpeted track that led to the office--my thinking stabbed more along these lines: a name belittles that which is named. Give a person a name and he'll sink right into it, right into the hollows and the dips of the letters that spelled out the whole insultingly reductive contraption, so that you have to pull him up and dance him out of it, take his attendance, and fuck some life into him if you expect to get any work out of him. Multiply him by twenty-two and you will have some idea of what the office was like, except that a good third of my colleagues were female.”