“There are no reasons. She is obliged to be as she is. We all are. Reasons are in books.”

“Doctor, I had never had anybody like her in my life, she was the fulfillment of my most lascivious adolescent dreams– but marry her, can she be serious? You see, for all her preening andperfumes, she has a very low opinion of herself, and simultaneously– and here is the source of much ofour trouble-a ridiculously high opinion of me. And simultaneously, a very low opinion of me! She isone confused Monkey, and, I'm afraid, not too very bright.”

“Zuckerman, sucker though he was for seriousness, was still not going to be drawn into a discussion about agents and editors. If ever there was a reason for an American writer to seek asylum in Red China, it would be to put ten thousand miles between himself and those discussions.”

“I don't know whether you're lying to me or you're telling me the truth. But if you're telling me the truth, that she's dead, it's the best news that I ever heard. Nobody else is going to say this to you. Everybody else is going to commiserate. But I grew up with you. I talk straight to you. The best thing for you is for her to be dead. She did not belong to you. She did not belong to anything you were. She did not belong to anything anyone is. You played ball--there was a field of play. She was not on the field of play. She was nowhere near it. Simple as that. She was out of bounds, a freak of nature, way out of bounds. You are to stop your mourning for her. You've kept this wound open for twenty-five years. And twenty-five years is enough. It's driven you mad. Keep it any longer and it's going to kill you. She's dead? Good! Let her go. Otherwise it will rot in your gut and take your life too." That's what I told him. I thought I could let the rage out of him. But he just cried. He couldn't let it go. I said this guy was going to get killed from this thing, and he did.”

“I suppose I should have laughed even more uproariously at what happened next; as a newly anointed convert to the Old Comedy, I should have bounded to my feet, cried aloud, "Hallelujah!" and sung the praises of He Who Created Us, He Who Formed Us from the Mud, the One and Only Comic Almighty, OUR SOVEREIGN REDEEMER ARISTOPHANES, but for reasons all too profane (total mental paralysis) I could only gape at the sight of nothing less than the highly entertaining Aristophanic erection that Pipik had produced....”

“For her, being an American was loathing America, but loving America was something he could not let go of any more than he could let go of loving his father and his mother, any more than he could have let go of his decency. How could she "hate" this country when she had no conception of this country? How could a child of his be so blind as to revile the "rotten system" that had given her own family every opportunity to succeed? To revile her "capitalist" parents as though their wealth were the product of anything other than the unstinting industry of three generations. The men of three generations, including even himself, slogging through the slime and stink of a tannery. The family that started out in a tannery, at one with, side by side with, the lowest of the low - now to her "capitalist dogs." There wasn't much difference and she knew it, between hating America and hating them. He loved the America she hated and blamed for everything that was imperfect in life and wanted violently to overturn, he loved the "bourgeois values" she hated and ridiculed and wanted to subvert, he loved the mother she hated and had all but murdered by doing what she did. Ignorant fucking bitch! The price they had paid! Why shouldn't he tear up this Rita Cohen letter? They were back! The sadistic mischief-makers with their bottomless talent for antagonism who had extorted from him the Audrey Hepburn scrapbook, the stuttering diary, and the ballet shoes, these delinquent young brutes calling themselves "revolutionaries" who had so viciously played with his hopes five years back had decided the time had again rolled around to laugh at Swede Levov.”

“She might have wallowed a long while in the pleasures of resistance and the challenge of discovering how unrestrained she could be. But she would have been at home. At home you flip out a little and that's it. You do not have the pleasure of the unadulterated pleasure. You don't get to the point where you flip out a little so many times that you finally decide it's such a great, great kick, why not flip out a lot? At home there is no opportunity to douse yourself in this squalor. At home you can't live where the disorder is. At home you can't live where nothing is reined in. At home there is the tremendous discrepancy between the way she imagines the world to be and the way the world is for her. Well, no longer is there that dissonance to disturb her equilibrium.”