“Suffering is just part of the great tapestry of life.”

“The unexpected is the plight of innovation.”

“Over the past year, since breaking up with Martin, she had begun to notice the foreignness of the place, to suffer from the chill that dried her skin and never really left her, even in the summer. And yet she couldn't make up her mind to leave. She depended on the place now; she had grown attached to it with the obstinacy with which people become attached only to things that hurt them.”

“It was another of the things he had left behind, another obvious step in a boy's life that he had decided not to take, so as to stay as far as possible from the machinery of life.”

“His wife was disappearing from life like a wet mark drying on a shirt.”

“From the stereo came music that Alice didn't recognize, but it wasn't there to be listened to, just to complete a perfect scenario; there was nothing casual about it.”

“People took what they wanted, they clutched at coincidences, the few there were, and made a life from them. . . . Choices are made in brief seconds and paid for in the time that remains.”