“It must be nice, Queenie thought, to be one thing or another, to know where you belonged.”

“Ask a book publisher how many copies a book has sold, and he or she, presuming you’re not the author, will probably try to remember the size of the first printing, then double it. If you’re the author, the publisher will try to remember the number of copies that were shipped and cut that in half in order to avoid encouraging you to expect a big royalty check.”

“Never walk away from failure. On the contrary, study it carefully for its hidden assets.”

“Escapism sold books, to be sure, but not nearly as many as were sold by exposing America’s flaws and making the average American reader (and book club member) look closely at his or her most cherished social assumptions. Americans might not be eager to accept integration, feminism, homosexuality, juvenile delinquency, and the drug culture– or to shoulder the blame for the existence of these problems– but they were certainly willing to read about them.”

“The moral of the story is that grief, to the person of feeling, is a permanent wound, not a transient state.”

“He was a fugitive, lurking soul, James Leer. He didn't belong anywhere, but things went much better for him in places where nobody belonged. ”

“The important thing is to be able to live in a place or a situation where you must use your sixth sense all the time.”