“He had never imagined so clearly the consequences of mailing a letter—the impossibility of retrieving it from the iron mouth of the box; the inevitability if its steady progress through the postal system; the passing from bag to bag and postman to postman until a lone man in a van pulls up to the door and pushes a small pile through the letterbox. It seemed suddenly horrible that one's words could not be taken back, one's thoughts allowed none of the remediation of speaking face to face.”

“Ah yes, the dreaded one-way system. . . He and Nancy had laughed later, imagining Dante redesigning Purgatory into a one-way system offering occasional glimpses of St. Peter and the pearly gates over two separate sets of dividing concrete barriers.”

“It would be a primal offering of food from man to woman and a satisfyingly primitive declaration of intent. However, he mused, one could never be sure these days who would be offended by being handed a dead mallard bleeding from a breast full of tooth-breaking shot and sticky about the neck with dog saliva.”

“He cursed himself for having assumed the weather would be sunny. Perhaps it was the result of evolution, he thought--some adaptive gene that allowed the English to go on making blithe outdoor plans in the face of almost certain rain.”

“He had always assumed gossip to be the malicious whispering of uncomfortable truths not the fabrication of absurdities. How was one to protect oneself against people making up things Was a life of careful impeccable behavior not enough in a world where inventions were passed around as fact”

“Oh, you're American,' said Mrs. Khan, holding out her hand. 'What a charming costume.''The Bengal Lancers were apparently a famous Anglo-Indian regiment,' said the young man. He pulled at his thighs to display the full ballooning of the white jodhpurs. 'Though how the Brits conquered the empire wearing clown pants is beyond me.''From the nation that conquered the West wearing leather chaps and hats made of dead squirrel,' said the Major.”

“He opened his mouth to say that she looked extremely beautiful and deserved armfuls of roses, but the words were lost in committee somewhere, shuffled aside by the parts of his head that worked full-time at avoiding ridicule.”