“...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.”

“We shared a sympathetic look, mutually marveling that kids who commit grown-up crimes still have their little-boy sweet tooth.”

“Whenever I see fat people, they're eating," I ruminated safely out of the diner's earshot. "Don't give me this it's glands or genes or a slow metabolism rubbish. It's food. They're fat because they eat the wrong food, too much of it, and all the time.”

“Casting my own eye down Fifth Avenue as my belly swelled, I would register with incredulity: Every one of these people came from a woman's cunt.”

“I had created my own Other Woman who happened to be a boy. I'd seen this in-house cuckolding in other families, and it's odd that I'd failed to spot it in ours.”

“What did I expect, that you would wrap my rib cage with those enormous hands in which horses must be measured, lifting me overhead with the stern reproach that is every Western woman's sly delight, "You're too thin"?”

“I hazarded to your mother that tragedy seems to bring out all varieties of unexpected qualities in people. I said it was as if some folks (I was thinking of Mary) got dunked in plastic, vacuum-sealed like backpacking dinners, and could do nothing but sweat in their private hell. And others seemed to have just the opposite problem, as if disaster had dipped them in acid instead, stripping off the outside layer of skin that once protected them from the slings and arrows of other people's outrageous fortunes. For these sorts, just walking down the street in the wake of every stranger's ill wind became an agony, an aching slog through the man's fresh divorce and that woman's terminal throat cancer. They were in hell, too, but it was everybody's hell, this big, shoreless, sloshing sea of toxic waste.”