“Forty seemed about right, and it occurred to me that it's too bad for a fella to die at forty, a real shame. It's a man's most anonymous age.”

“Their lives had another forty seconds to run.”

“The family exists for many reasons, but its most basic function may be to draw together after a member dies.”

“Everything's a lot tougher when it's for real. That's when you choke. When it's for real.”

“I don't want to see it anymore. It's lousy. And it's a cheat. You build it all around something... set yourself on something... and then you don't want it. Isn't it too bad the great truths are all such lies?”

“I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all.”

“It occured to her that pleasure, no matter how deep, was a ghostly, ephemeral thing. Love might make the world go round, but she was convinced it ws the cries of the badly wounded andf deeply afflicted which spun the universe on the great glass pole of it's axis.”