“noone knows and noone seeswe lovers doing what we pleasebut people stop and point at theseten milk bottles a-turning into cheese”

“So it's off with the shellsuit and on with the Armanis,Bring out the champagne and the caviar sarnies”

“What about fateful turns in your life? Naturalists like Thomas Hardy proposed that some people are simply born under 'a blighted star' like his heroine in Tess of the D'Urbervilles. If so, then no matter what we did, we couldn't improve our lives.”

“What the dead don't know piles up, though we don't notice it at first. They don't know how we're getting along without them, of course, dealing with the hours and days that now accrue so quickly, and, unless they divined this somehow in advance, they don't know that we don't want this inexorable onslaught of breakfasts and phone calls and going to the bank, all this stepping along, because we don't want anything extraneous to get in the way of what we feel about them or the ways we want to hold them in mind.”

“Sometimes two people will regard each other over a gulf too wide to ever be bridged, and know immediately what could have happened, and that it never will.”

“Why do we remember the Boys of Summer? We remember because we were young when they were, of course. But more, we remember because we feel the ache of guilt and regret. While they were running, jumping, leaping, we were slouched behind typewriters, smoking and drinking, pretending to some mystic communion with men we didn't really know or like. Men from ghettos we didn't dare visit, or rural farms we passed at sixty miles an hour. Loving what they did on the field, we could forget how superior we felt towards them the rest of the time. By cheering them on we proved we had nothing to do with the injustices that kept their lives separate from ours. There's nothing sordid or false about the Boys of Summer. Only our memories smell like sweaty jockstraps.”

“Dreams are deformed reflections of ourselves - less stable and more ungraspable than we are, upon which we in our turn assume the right to reflect upon and to determine.”