“She remembers this phrase from his final months of law school, when he brought home the books on starting up a business. He'd read ravenously for several weeks and then predicted: "Well, darling, we're going to be rich." Now he slaps shut the last of his books and announces, with equal assurance: "We're all going to die.”

“They'd need to do some shopping. As he adjusted the shoulders of the last dress, their eyes met in the mirror. He raised his right hand solemnly. "I swear I never played with Barbie dolls." A grin flickered at the corner of her mouth, and she opened her mouth, then closed it again. He raised an eyebrow. "You might as well say it; go on." Her expression in the mirror was both sly and apprehensive. "Just thinking perhaps you were making up for lost time." He ran his hand up beneath the back of the dress and pinched her, making her yelp. "Yup, no question about it. Lego was never like this." He stroked her ass and the straps that demarcated ass from thigh. "Not like this.”

“A dear and long-time friend,... asked me, "Jack, how long does it usually take you to write a book?" I replied, "Of course it depends on the project and its requirements, each book has its own rules. But for a statement to the world at large, once I've thought a book through and written it in my mind, it takes me around a week or so, depending on this and that, ordinarily at the rate of a chapter a day, but I've had some two-chapters day and some chapters have taken two days. And then of course there is revision, but around a week is about right." He seemed surprised, and I was surprised by his surprise, so I thought, maybe I'm wrong. I went home and wrote this book, at the perfectly normal pace of a chapter a day, as usual...”

“The raven of Edgar Allan Poe has a halo that he extinguishes from time to time("Spanish Generosity")”

“We're all in the end-of-your-life book-club, whether we acknowledge it or not; each book we read may well be the last, each conversation the final one.”

“What man seeks, to the point of anguish, in his gods, in his art, in his science, is meaning. He cannot bear the void. He pours meaning on events like salt on his food.”

“Jack reads too many books. He thinks we're going to drive all year and have great adventures.”