“All broken hearts are circumstantial. Every lovelorn jerk is the victim of bad timing, good intentions, and someone else’s poor decision making.”

“It happened all the time. Maybe someone had a legitimate gripe that deserved airing. Maybe someone had a compliment that shouldn't go unspoken. No one said a thing. So long and stay in touch, that's usually all we said. Take care of yourself, good luck. We said nothing about affection, appreciation, admiration.”

“We all knew there was a good deal of pointlessness to nearly all the meetings and in fact one meeting out of every three or four was nearly perfectly without gain or purpose but many meetings revealed the one thing that was necessary and so we attended them and afterward we thanked each other.”

“We had the great good fortune and shortcomings of character that marked every generation that had never seen war.”

“We had any number of clocks surrounding us, and every one of them at one time or another exhibited a lively sense of humor.”

“Hank Nearly was an avid reader. He arrived early in his brown corduroy coat, with a book taken from the library, copied all the pages on the Xerox machine, and sat at his desk reading what looked passebly like the honest pages of business. He's make it through a three-hundred-page novel every two or three days.”

“We found ourselves wanting to hurry time along, which was not in the long run good for our health. Everybody was trapped in this contradiction but nobody ever dared to articulate it.”