“Everything was neat, clean, and normal except for the three-legged cat sitting on the coffee table drinking out of a big ass coffee cup.”

“...and at the table next to her was a little boy in a soccer uniform sitting with his mother who told him, The plural of elf is elves. A wave of happiness came over me. It felt giddy to be part of it all. To be drinking a cup of coffee like a normal person. I wanted to shout out: The plural of elf is elves! What a language! What a world!”

“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”

“Sometimes, just sit down and have a cup of coffee with yourself. That can be a cool experience - of hanging out with yourself.”

“You could guarantee a decent cup of coffee in Betty's, but it went beyond the decent coffee and the respectable girls (and women) who had been parcelled up some time in the 1930s and freshly unwrapped this morning. It was the way that everything was exactly right and fitting. And clean.”

“I drink coffee sometimes, but Starbucks’ coffee tastes like burnt ass,” I say.“Actually, it tastes nothing like burnt ass, Anna.”“And how would you know what burnt ass tastes like?”He laughs. “That’s for me to know…and you to find out.”I’m not sure I want to find out, but whatever.”