“Ten neatly coiffed female attendants stand against the walls, ready and waiting. Wearing starched yellow blouses with pink crossover ties neatly folded under the collar, they look as much a part of the ship’s decoration as the sparkling crystal chandeliers that hang overhead.”

“I looked down at my hands. They were folded neatly together on the table like they belonged to someone else, as if someone had left their gloves behind and I had arranged them ready for collection.”

“She was a page torn from a calendar, a year folded neatly and laid aside in some place you never look.”

“He knew her now. She was the weird girl in the class above him, who dyed her hair pink and always wore a lot of pentragrams and crystals. Right now she was also wearing giant chandelier earings and a violent pink T-Shirt that bore the words ROMEO AND JULIET WOULDN'T HAVE LASTED.”

“How small and neat and comically serious the other men looked, with their grey-flecked crew cuts and their button-down collars and their brisk little hurrying feet! There were endless desperate swarms of them, hurrying through the station and the streets, and an hour from now they would all be still. The waiting mid-town office buildings would swallow them up and contain them, so that to stand in one tower looking out across the canyon to another would be to inspect a great silent insectarium displaying hundreds of tiny pink men in white shirts, forever shifting papers and frowning into telephones, acting out their passionate little dumb show under the supreme indifference of the rolling spring clouds.”

“He has left nothing except for a note, which I find neatly folded under one of my sneakers.The Story of Solomon is the only way I know how to explain.And then, in smaller letters:Forgive me.”