“You’d have to go through at least four different hugs to get from the kitchen to the front room. Those relatives!’.”

“Relentlessly, I read on: “Number one: Make at least two friends your own age. Number two: Go places besides your room. Number three: Get boyfriend. Number four: Make sure Mom and Dad notice numbers one through three.”

“As she walked, trying to find a hotel--any hotel--she was offered at least ten different ways of getting high, four or five ways of getting laid, and at least one way of getting even.”

“When he went through the kitchen he kissed Rebeca on the forehead."Get those bad thoughts out of your head," he told her. "You're going to be happy.”

“Have you ever had that feeling—that you’d like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?”

“It puzzled K., at least it puzzled him looking at it from the policemen's point of view, that they had made him go into the room and left him alone there, where he had ten different ways of killing himself. At the same time, though, he asked himself, this time looking at it from his own point of view, what reason he could have to do so. Because those two were sitting there in the next room and had taken his breakfast, perhaps?”