“Insomniacs know better than anyone how it would be to haunt a house.”

“Accept that, like many men, you have a streak of the homoerotic in you. Why would you, why would anyone, want to be that straight?”

“Peter's mother was grand, in her way. She managed to complain almost ceaselessly without ever seeming trivial or kvetchy. She was regal rather than crotchety, she had been sent to live in this world from a better one, and she saved herself from mere mean-spiritedness by offering resignation in place of bile - by implying, every hour of her life, that although she objected to almost everybody and everythng she did so because she'd presided over some utopia, and so knew from experience how much better we all could do. She wanted more than anything to live under a benevolent dictator who was exactly like her without being her - if she actually ruled she would relinquish her right to object, and without her right to object who and what would she be?”

“One always has a better book in one's mind than one can manage to get onto paper.”

“He insists on a version of you that is funnier, stranger, more eccentric and profound than you suspect yourself to be--capable of doing more good and more harm in the world than you've ever imagined--it is all but impossible not to believe, at least in his presence and a while after you've left him, that he alone sees through your essence, weighs your true qualities . . . and appreciates you more fully than anyone else ever has.”

“She thinks how much more space a being occupies in life than it does in death; how much illusion of size is contained in gestures and movements, in breathing. Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.”

“Outside the house is a world where the shelves are stocked, where radio waves are full of music, where young men walk the streets again, men who have deprievation and a fear worse than death, who have willingly given up their early twenties and now, thinking of thirty and beyond, haven't any time to spare.”