“That's the trouble with caring about anybody, you begin to feel overprotective. Then you begin to feel crowded.”

“His insides are beginning to feel sickly. The pain of the world is a crater all these syrups and pills a thousandfold would fail to fill.”

“But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.”

“Standing amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a funny sudden feeling that what he has come to meet, what's floating in unseen about to land, is not his son Nelson and daughter-in-law Pru and their two children but something more ominous and intimately his: his own death, shaped vaguely like an airplane.”

“Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works.”

“The substance of fictional architecture is not bricks and mortar but evanescent consciousness. Sometimes, therefore, a door opens onto a hallway impossibly, and the placement of our heating ducts and storage space borders on the irresponsible. I have great trouble, myself, in imagining the floor plans of split-level homes, though I feel they are important sites of the American condition.”

“Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.”