“He'd wondered for so many years if he'd ever be able to forgive his father. Maybe he'd just used the wrong word. Surrender. Acceptance. Those seemed better.”

“Real truths, as opposed to imagined ones, are able to stand up to rigorous debate and questioning .”

“Depending on the year or the therapist he was seeing, he'd learned to ascribe just about every facet of his character as a psychological reaction to his parents' fighting: his laziness, his overachieving, his tendency to isolate, his tendency to seduce, his hypochondria, his sense of invulnerability, his self-loathing, his narcissism.”

“Whereas my grandfather was getting used to a much more terrifying reality. Holding my hand to keep his balance, as trees and bushes made strange, sliding movements in his peripheral vision, Lefty was confronting the possibility that consciousness was a biological accident. Though he'd never been religious, he realized now that he'd always believed in the soul, in a force of personality that survived death. But as his mind continued to waver, to short-circuit, he finally arrived at the cold-eyed conclusion, so at odds with his youthful cheerfulness, that the brain was just an organ like any other and that when it failed he would be no more.”

“Chase was gone then, and Donnie was back, alone in his room, wondering about those pictures from an art book he'd so admired. Because it felt like he'd just lived one, and it had been beautiful, so beautiful, and he'd been able to reach out and touch the lines of it, but it still hurt.”

“Semiotic was the form Zipperstein`s midlife crisis had taken... Instead of buying sports car, he'd bought deconstrution.”

“How well they all knew each other now, he thought. In twelve weeks James felt he had come to know more about these three men than any of the so-called friends he'd known for twenty years. For the first time he understood why his father continually referred back to friendships formed during the war with men he normally would never have met. He realised how much he was going to miss Stephen when he returned to America. Success was, in fact, going to split them up.”