“The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires.”

“We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.”

“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.”

“There is this quality, in things, of the right way seeming wrong at first.”

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

“It frightens him to think of her this way. It makes her seem, in terms of love, so vast.”