“...and dread came back like a hoot from a bully on the street outside.”

“The feeling of joy came up in me again the way the lyric of a song might remind a man on the edge of insanity that soon he will be insane again and there is a world there more interesting than his own.”

“Beneath a toilet water of punctilio and restraint...a deep smell came off Kelly, a hint of a big foul cat, carnal as the meat on a butcher's block, and something else, some whiff of the icy rot and iodine in a piece of marine nerve left to bleach on the sand. With it all was that congregated odor of the wealthy, a mood within the nose of face powder, of perfumes which leave the turpentine of a witch's curse, the taste of pennies in the mouth, a whiff of the tomb. It was all of Deborah for me.”

“At the end of medicine is dope; at the end of life is death; at the end of man may be the Hell which arrives from the vanities of the mind.”

“I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.”

“There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.”

“...the Waldorf looked like one of the dead and empty spaces which collect about the exit of a man who has lost a million in an hour.”