“Drunk, Jane spoke as though she were Nancy Drew. I was a fool for a girl with a dainty lexicon.”

“Naomi was a tough kid, so much tougher than Landsman ever needed to be. She was two years younger, close enough for everything Landsman did or said to constitute a mark that must be surpassed or a theory to disprove. She was boyish as a girl and mannish as a woman. When some drunken fool asked if she was a lesbian, she would say, “In everything but sexual preference.”

“When some drunken fool asked if she was a lesbian, she would say, 'In everything but sexual preference.”

“I don't want to have 'carnal knowledge' with any old Zuni, asshole." From the way she seemed to relish the word asshole as it unwound from her lips, I guessed that she rarely used it. It sounded like a mark of esteem, and I was momentarily very jealous of Arthur. I wondered what it might take to get Jane to call me an asshole too.”

“That was how troubles arrived, mourners rushing the bar at a wake. Though they came in funereal flocks, they could be dismissed only one at a time, and that was how she would have to proceed.”

“She had long since lost the sense of her dresses and skirts and blouses; they were rote phrases of rayon and cotton that she daily intoned.”

“She was a natural blonde, with delicate hands and feet, and in her youthful photographs one saw a girl with mocking eyes and a tragic smile, the course of whose life would conspire in time to transpose that pair of adjectives.”