“The Summer of Love had already given way to the the winter of Who the f--k are you?”

“You see, sex for Jews is not such a terrible sin. It's just one more physical sport we're gonna stink at.”

“Everyone I meet now is at least ten years younger than me. I feel like Rip van Winkle with a bald spot.”

“It was was very important not to cast any pearls before swine -- especially when one of the swine was trying to keep kosher.”

“And we'd look at each other the way you do when you see someone on the street you think you recognize, but not quite. Someone you wish with all your heart were there but who is actually just a stranger. And you feel a kind of deep longing that hurts like a huge gash and your inability to fix it leaves you frustrated and angry and bone-deep lonely.”

“F. once said: At sixteen I stopped fucking faces. I had occasioned the remark by expressing disgust at his latest conquest, a young hunchback he had met while touring an orphanage. F. spoke to me that day as if I were truly one of the underprivileged; or perhaps he was not speaking to me at all when he muttered: Who am I to refuse the universe?”

“Thinking, not for the first time, that life should come with a trapdoor. Just a little exit hatch you could disappear through when you´d utterly and completely mortified yourself. Or when you had spontaneous zit eruptions.“Good book?” he asked, taking it from her and reading the subtitle, “A Guide for Good Girls Who (Sometimes) Want to Be Bad,” out loud.But life did not come with a trapdoor. ”