“Ira felt as if he'd contracted an all-over emotional itch, as if he'd put on a sweater made of spiritually abrasive wool- but to take it off would leave him dreadfully cold.”

“All I meant was that people take their same old lives wherever they go. No place is perfect enough to strip you of that. And some places have a way of magnifying your demons, or of, I don't know, giving them pep pills.”

“People take their same old lives wherever they go. No place is perfect enough to strip you of that.”

“There you are, diligently swimming a straight line, minding the form of your strokes, when you look up and see, always a shock, the currents you can't even feel have pulled you off course.”

“My tastes, like my bones, fossilized decades ago. Reach a certain age and you are obliged to become an anthropologist. It's the only way to ignore that the rest of the world regards you as an artifact, that your culture has faded beyond the horizon, leaving you adrift on your tiny, solitary life raft.”

“You have not truly met someone until you have looked him or her in the eye as a soul with a place in your future.”

“Of all the virtues, discretion began to seem the most rewarding: it kept people guessing and sometimes, by default, admiring.”