“A horseman of the old school, a gentleman who never forgot to dip down and stake you when he win. He was more ashamed to be stingy than to be broke, so as long as he had two dollars you had one . . .”

“That’s when he’d run and run until he was nothing more than two feet and a pair of lungs, until he coughed blood and stank of sweat and forgot for an hour or two everything that he was and what he had to do and the people who’d get hurt along the way.”

“God is imagined as a rich, old gentleman who is very happy that things are going so smooth here on Earth that he had created.”

“. . .how he had loved Christine more than he had understood, that sometimes one forgot what it meant, really, to love, the way the tide of a marriage advances and retreats, . .”

“A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out.”

“But you, Achilles,/ There is not a man in the world more blest than you--/ There never has been, never will be one./ Time was, when you were alive, we Argives/ honored you as a god, and now down here, I see/ You Lord it over the dead in all your power./ So grieve no more at dying, great Achilles.’I reassured the ghost, but he broke out protesting,/ ‘No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus!/ By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man--/ Some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive—than rule down here over all the breathless dead.”