“Why go for something cold and dead, when you can have something hot and panting?”

“Mr. Landowsky was eighty-two and somehow his chest had shrunk over the years, and now he was forced to hike his pants up under his armpits. "Oi," he said. "This heat! I can't breathe. Somebody should do something."I assumed he was talking about God. "That weatherman on the morning news. He should be shot. How can I go out in weather like this? And then when it gets so hot they keep the supermarkets too cold. Hot, cold. Hot, cold. It gives me the runs." I was glad I owned a gun, because when I got as old as Mr. Landowsky I was going to eat a bullet. The first time I got the runs in the supermarket, that was it. BANG! It would all be over.”

“Why go through something alone when there's someone you trust to be with you?”

“These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light - the soul's certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer.”

“Learn to trust your instincts. Only something dead goes with the tide. Only something living can go against it.”

“When you are missing something you've left behind, it could be dead or lost so that you never find it again. You never really know, when you don't have something, what its condition is. That's why you grieve about it to the same degree- because you just don't know.”