“Deploring other people--their lack of perfection--had always been our sport.”

“Then again, there had always been something not quite right about the Berglunds.”

“The truth is that nothing between Patty and Richard was ever going to last, because they couldn't help being disappointments to each other, because neither was as lovable to the other as Walter was to both of them. Every time Patty lay by herself after sex, she sank down into sadness and loneliness, because Richard was always going to be Richard, whereas with Walter, there had always been the possibility, however faint, and however slow in its realization, that their story would change and deepen.”

“Success at sports is the province of the almost empty head.”

“Katz had read extensively in popular sociobiology, and his understanding of the depressive personality type and its seemingly perverse persistence in the human gene pool was that depression was successful adaptation to ceaseless pain and hardship. Pessimism, feelings of worthlessness and lack of entitlement, inability to derive satisfaction from pleasure, a tormenting awareness of the world's general crappiness: for Katz Jewish paternal forebears, who'd been driven from shtetl to shtetl by implacable anti-Semites, as for the old Angles and Saxons on his mother's side, who'd labored to grow rye and barley in the poor soils and short summers of northern Europe, feeling bad all the time and expecting the worse had been natural ways of equilibriating themselves with the lousiness of their circumstances. Few things gratified depressives, after all, more than really bad news. This obviously wasn't an optimal way to live, but it had its evolutionary advantages.”

“He didn't understand what happened to him. He felt like a piece of paper that had once had coherent writing on it but had been through the wash. He felt roughened, bleached, and worn out along the fold lines.”

“An odd thing about beauty, however, is that it's absence tends not to arouse our sympathy as much as other forms of privation do.”