“Minusta tuntuu hyvältä nähdä luuni. Pidän siitä että näen ja tunnen ne. Kun minun ja luitteni välillä on liikaa lihaa, tuntuu kuin jotenkin etääntyisin itsestäni. Ymmärrätkö?”

“Tunnen olevani kuin hattaranekku: sokeria ja ilmaa. Jos minua puristaa niin minusta tulee pieni, etovaa kosteutta tihkuva punertava mytty.”

“I often felt the girls' speech was interchangeable, without any individuality whatsoever, a kind of herd-speak they had all agreed upon.”

“The transience of human feeling is nothing short of ludicrous. My mercurial fluctuations in the course of a single evening made me feel as if I had a character made pf chewing gum. I had fallen into the ugly depths of self-pity, a terrain just above the even more hideous lowlands of despair. Then, easily distracted twit that I am, I had, soon after, found myself on maternal heights, where I had practically swooned with pleasure as I bobbed and fondled the borrowed homunculus next door. I had eaten well, drunk too much wine, and embraced a young woman I hardly knew. In short, I had thoroughly enjoyed myself and had every intention of doing so again. [p. 59]”

“Widowers marry again because it makes their lives easier. Widows often don't, because it makes their lives harder. [p. 61]”

“Shorn of intimacy and seen from a considerable distance, we are all comic characters, farcical buffoons who bumble through our lives, making fine messes as we go, but when you get close, the ridiculous quickly fades into the sordid or the tragic or the merely sad. [p. 73]”

“Lots of women read fiction. Most men don't. Women read fiction written by women and by men. Most men don't. If a man opens a novel,. he likes to have a masculine name on the cover; it's reassuring somehow. You never know what might happen to that external genitalia if you immerse yourself in imaginary doings concocted by someone with the goods on the inside.”