“Once he'd been an open book and the days had been too short to hold all our words.”

“Folk said he had once been a scholar and written books and learned and learned till his brain fair softened and right off his head he'd gone and into the poorhouse asylum.”

“I see he had his shorts on under the towel all along.I think for a fact that she'd rather he'd of been stark naked under that towel than had on those shorts. She's glaring at those big white whales leaping round on his shorts in pure wordless outrage.”

“How strange too and unfamiliar to think that one had been loved, that one's presence had once had the power to make a difference between happiness and dullness in another's day.”

“He'd been inside of a storm, all right. He'd been swept up in a tornado of sex and memory, naked regret and short-lived ecstasy. Now he felt tossed out of it onto the hard, prickly ground. He felt bruised and used.”

“It should be possible to exist with only a short shelf of books, to read and give away. After all - we may not open a book, once read, for ten years or more. But the act of reading has made it part of us - to relinquish it would be to lose an extension of our being.”