“Almost everyone is dying to leave home, eventually; and almost everyone needs to.”

“The history of a city was like the history of a family—there is closeness and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories. ”

“The excitement of anticipation was *almost* equal to the thrill of lovemaking ...”

“Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole.”

“A truly happy woman drives some men and almost every other woman absolutely crazy”

“Just accept as a fact that everyone of any emotional importance to you is related to everyone else of any emotional importance to you; these relationships need not extend to blood, of course, but the people who change your life emotionally - all those people, from different places, from different times, spanning many wholly unrelated coincidences - are nonetheless 'related'. We associate people with each other for emotional not for factual reasons - people who've never met each other, who don't even know each other exists; people, even, who have forgotten us.”

“Like any good novel, it lulled him into an almost tranquil state of awareness before it jolted him - it caught him completely by surprise.”