“Do go on,' he said. 'There's nothing I enjoy more than listening to a highly trained intelligence leapfrogging common sense and coming to the wrong conclusions. It gives me renewed faith in parliamentary democracy.”

“The man who said the pen was mightier than the sword ought to have tried reading "The Mill on the Floss" to Motor Mechanics.”

“Feelings don't go away, people do.”

“He was in hell. Worse than that, he was in hell, and someone had set it on repeat.”

“Some would say it is madness to want a woman this way,but I think it must be love. Not the tepid, fickle love of which thepoets sing—the love that forms or fades with kindness or cruelty.No, this love is something more divine—like the love of a god, bothvengeful and benign. It is as constant as the sea. And as beautiful.As dangerous. As mysterious.She is the only woman to ever refuse me. And yet, I want…”

“Then came that sigh. I wish I had had a tape recorder handy every time in my life that I heard a boy sigh at the outset of urination. What a lovely sound. So much satisfaction. Girls sigh far less often before they pee, and not with the same devotion, I think. If only I had such a recording of boys' sighs. I would lie on a pillow in the sunlight of the late afternoon, sometimes listening to Chopin, sometimes Schubert, and sometimes to the sighs, seriatim, of all the boys about to pee.”

“Why do you dwell on things that don’t matter when there are so many things that do?”