“Kenneth was a sitting duck. In fewer than three years he would kneel alone in this very room, on the exact spot where he now stood, emptying the contents of his desk into cardboard boxes from the liquor store while his gaunt bitter wife reviled him in the Goldbergs' living room and choked the Goldbergs' big brass ashtray with with unfiltered cigarette butts, and if anyone were then to ask him for the secret of a happy life, he would answer: Stasis.”

“It puzzled K., at least it puzzled him looking at it from the policemen's point of view, that they had made him go into the room and left him alone there, where he had ten different ways of killing himself. At the same time, though, he asked himself, this time looking at it from his own point of view, what reason he could have to do so. Because those two were sitting there in the next room and had taken his breakfast, perhaps?”

“It wasn't until we dropped him at his university dormitory and left him there looking touchingly lost and bewildered amid an assortment of cardboard boxes and suitcases in a spartan room not unlike a prison cell that it really hit home that he was vanishing out of our lives and into his own.”

“His room was dark until he switched on his desk lamp. I sat on the floor next to his bed and watched him counting clothes and considering shoes. He seemed so boyish right then—like he wished his mom would just come in and pack for him. I couldn’t possibly love him any more than I did at that moment.”

“there was a soldier in the next room living with his wife and he would soon be going over there to protect me from Hitler so I snapped the radio off and then heard his wife say, "you shouldn't have done that." and the soldier said, "FUCK THAT GUY!" which I thought was a very nice thing for him to tell his wife to do. of course, she never did.”

“He threw his burning cigarette onto our clean living room floor and ground it into the wood with his boot.We were about to become cigarettes.”