“The loveliness of the day was enough to knock you down. Swallows rioted above the calm green lid of the lake. Birch trees gleamed like filaments among the dark evergreens. No planes disturbed the sky. I felt dead to it, though I did take a kind of comfort that all of this beauty was out here, persisting like mad, whether you hearkened to it or not.”

“With two hours until her mother picked her up, Janey was alone, woozy and heart-swollen in the downtown, wandering wet streets that gleamed as you would have them gleam in the sweet summer film of your life.”

“Retreat""I can't explain why I did these things, except to say that I carry a little imp inside me whose ambrosia is my brother's wrath.”

“He'd tell me love was like the chicken pox, a thing to get through early because it could really kill you in your later years.”

“It turned out to be just his sort of life in Melbourne [Florida] -- a little three-room mini apartment to himself, and down on the strip, five different bars where you had women going around in bathing suits. In the backyard, his mother's new husband had grown a miraculous tree, a lemon trunk grafted with orange, tangerine, satsuma, kumquat, and grapefruit limbs, each bearing its own vivid fruit. Every morning, Jeff would go out and fill his arms, and squeeze himself a pitcher of juice, thick and sun-hot. That house was good for his mother, too. The swimming pool trimmed fifteen pounds off of her. She didn't seem to have moods anymore, and she didn't fly off the handle when Jeff beat her in the cribbage games they played most afternoons.”

“Down Through the Valley""When Jane left me for Barry Kramer, it was a heavy kind of hurt, but by the time she took up with him, there wasn't a whole lot left for us. For quite a while, we'd been nothing but an argument looking for different ways to happen.”

“Over the years, I've made good money in real estate, and for some reason, this hurts Stephen's feelings. He's not a churchman, but he's extremely big on piety and sacrifice and letting you know what fine values he's got. As far as I can tell, these values consist of little more than eating ramen noodles by the case, getting laid once every fifteen years or so, and arching his back at the sight of people like me -- that is, people who have amounted to something and don't smell heavily of thrift stores.”