“The reason is that even in a fantasy there is nothing even remotely erotic about a toilet bowl. In fact, considered as an accoutrement to a sexual encounter, a toilet bowl is a real cold shower.”

“In her excitement at the idea of just walking out the door she had walked out the door without stopping to practice and without even her sheet music, and now she had nothing to play from and nothing prepared.Some people might have been daunted by this setback. The Konigsbergs faced musical catastrophe on a daily basis, & their motto was: Never say die.”

“There are people who think contraception is immoral because the object of copulation is procreation. In a similar way there are people who think the only reason to read a book is to write a book; people should call up books from the dust and the dark and write thousands of words to be sent down to the dust and the dark which can be called up so that other people can send further thousands of words to join them in the dust and the dark. Sometimes a book can be called from the dust and the dark to produce a book which can be bought in shops, and perhaps it is interesting, but the people who buy it and read it because it is interesting are not serious people, if they were serious they would not care about the interest they would be writing thousands of words to consign to the dust and the dark. There are people who think death a fate worse than boredom.”

“So Lucille pressed the button, and a panel slid open in the wall, and the transporter came through, and sure enough here was the bare butt of the client waiting to be whipped. For reasons best known to himself he had kept his shoes and socks on, so he was wearing well-polished black loafers and black silk socks.”

“Sometimes my mother did practice but one thing led to another and sometimes she did not. The advice of the homely man was something of a curse. She would not practice at all if she could not practice right so that gradually she played less and less and sometimes not at all.I used to think that things might have been different. Gieseking never played a scale and Glenn Gould hardly practiced at all, they would just look at the score and think and think and think. If the homely man had said to go away and think this would have been every bit as revolutionary a concept for a Konigsberg. Perhaps he even thought that you had to think. But you can't show someone how to think in an hour; you can give someone an exercise to take away.”

“He only tells the story once but you see it from about 8 points of view, you have to pay attention the whole time to see whether something seems to be true or is just what somebody says is true.”

“Something looked through my grandfather's eyes. It said Being an accountant, it's not the end of the world.Something looked at my Uncle Danny. Something looked at my aunts and it said A secretary, is that so terrible?Linda had seen four before her do something that was not so terrible and already there was something about them, their whole lives ahead of them and the best thing cut off, as if something that might have been a Heifetz had been walled up inside an accountant and left to die.Doom. Doom. Doom.”