“Her sureness was based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily. Moreover, his confusion was significant, whereas her order was not.”

“Betty took him for a walk in the zoo and he was amused by her evident belief in the curative power of animals. She seemed to think that it must steady him to look at a buffalo.”

“I'm going to be a star some day," she announced as though daring him to contradict her."I'm sure you...""It's my life. It's the only thing in the whole world that I want.""It's good to know what you want. I used to be a bookkeeper in a hotel,but...""If I'm not, I'll commit suicide.”

“He smoked a cigarette, standing in the dark and listening to her undress. She made sea sounds; something flapped like a sail; there was the creak of ropes; then he heard the wave-against-a-wharf smack of rubber on flesh. Her call for him to hurry was a sea-moan, and when he lay beside her, she heaved, tidal, moon-driven.”

“He Sat in the window thinking. Man has a tropism for order. Keys in one pocket, change in the other. Mandolins are tuned G D A E. The physical world has a tropism for disorder, entropy. Man against Nature...the battle of the centuries. Keys yearn to mix with change. Mandolins strive to get out of tune. Every order has within it the germ of destruction. All order is doomed, yet the battle is worth wile.”

“It seems to me that someone must surely take the hint and write the life of Miss McGeeney, the woman who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of the man who wrote the biography of Boswell.”

“But the romantic atmosphere only heightened his feeling of icy fatness.”