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

“Dan suggested to Owen and me that we were better off to not involve ourselves with Hester. How true! But how we wanted to be involved in the thrilling real-life sleaziness that we suspected Hester was in the thick-of. We were in a phase, through television and the movies, of living only vicariously. Even faintly sordid silliness excited us if it put us in contact with love.”

“(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it; it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action”

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

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

“Homer Wells, listening to Big Dot Taft, felt like her voice – dulled. Wally was away, Candy was away, and the anatomy of a rabbit was, after Clara, no challenge; the migrants, whom he’d so eagerly anticipated, were just plain hard workers; life was just a job. He had grown up without noticing when? Was there nothing remarkable in the transition?”

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