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

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

“What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?”

“You have a life and there are these volumes on either side that go unvisited; some day soon as the world winds he will lie beneath what he now stands on, dead as those insects whose sound he no longer hears, and the grass will go on growing, wild and blind.”

“One does not go to Moscow to get fat.”

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

“Some people find fall depressing, others hate spring. I've always been a spring person myself. All that growth, you can feel Nature groaning, the old bitch; she doesn't want to do it, not again, no, anything but that, but she has to. It's a fucking torture rack, all that budding and pushing, the sap up the tree trunks, the weeds and the insects getting set to fight it out once again, the seeds trying to remember how the hell the DNA is supposed to go, all that competition for a little bit of nitrogen; Christ, it's cruel.”