“Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them. ”

“It comes to him: growth is betrayal. There is no other route. There is no arriving somewhere without leaving somewhere.”

“The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.”

“The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.”

“Students present themselves...like a succession of CDs whose shimmering surface gives no clue to their contents without the equipment to play them.”

“How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.”

“The thing about her is, she’s good-natured. He knew it the second he saw her standing by the parking meters. He could just tell from the soft way her belly looked. With women, you keep bumping against them, because they want different things, they’re a different race. Either they give, like a plant, or scrape, like a stone. In all the green world nothing feels as good as a woman’s good nature.”