“How many more times would I have embraced him that night, how many more times would I have kissed him, if I had known the name of that stranger lover who was already in Montreal, who had already bought his stadium ticket from a scalper for the 5,000 tomorrow. That implacable lover who was going to turn Billy's eyes away from me forever.”

“The angel of death had cruised him. Death, that hustler, that last lover.”

“In my old age, I was at last being permitted to make the discovery that lovemaking gets better and better with time, if it's with someone you care for.”

“...doing the smoker's comedy act: he hunted automatically for an ashtray, didn't find one, tipped his ashes into the palm of his hand,...”

“Sooner or later you end up making deals with women. It's an injustice, really.”

“It seemed incredible that it could be the same road, the same asphalt, that they had traveled so many times together. You thought that you were the permanent part of your own experience, the net that held it all together—until you discovered that there were many selves, dissolving into one another so quickly over time that the buildings and the trees and even the pavement turned out to have more substance than you did.”

“There are, I dare say, many lovers who would never have been drawn to each other had they met for the first time, as, say, they met the second time.”