“That's good. I was worried. Of course, I do have a few things wrong with me, but those are strictly problems I keep inside. I'd hate to think they were obvious to anybody else. Especially at the swimming pool in the summer.”

“I'd swear to God, if I were a piano player or an actor or something and all those dopes thought I was terrific, I'd hate it. I wouldn't even want them to clap for me. People always clap for the wrong things. If I were a piano player, I'd play it in the goddam closet.”

“Take me home," she said, and the words hit me like a whip. I think I shook my head. "Take me home." There were levels of pain there, and subtlety, and an amazing cruelty. And I knew then that I'd never been hated, ever, as deeply or thoroughly as this wasted little girl hated me now, hated me for the way I'd looked, then looked away, beside Rubin's all-beer refrigerator. So--if that's the word--I did one of those things you do and never find out why, even though something in you knows you could never have done anything else. I took her home.”

“The summers before that are a blur of baby oil and Sun-In and hating our bodies (I got big breasts; Tibby got no breasts) at the Rockwood public swimming pool.”

“Here's what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird," said May Kasahara. "Everybody's born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I'd really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can't seem to do it. They just don't get it. Of course, the problem could be that I'm not explaining it very well, but I think it's because they're not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they're not, really. So I get worked up sometimes, and I do some crazy things.”

“Sometimes I hated it when I was right, but I always hated it when someone else was. Especially when their being right made me wrong. I’m irrational that way. It’s something I’m working on.”