“Anyway, I don't trust those people who poke around sad people's minds and tell them how interesting it all is up there. It's not interesting.”

“I had hard feelings around the holidays, the one time of year I couldnt help but fall prey to the canned self-pity Christmas prescribes.”

“I’d never heard my parents make love. If they made love, they did it silently, like bank robbers, like surgeons.”

“I had hard feelings around the holidays, the one time of year I couldn’t help but fall prey to the canned self-pity Christmas prescribes.”

“I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,I see my father strolling outunder the ochre sandstone arch, thered tiles glinting like bentplates of blood behind his head, Isee my mother...”

“We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in...”

“Each one of us has hated his or her parents at some point in early life how quickly we turn around our feelings determines our extent of success.”

“Sex can be used either for self-affirmation or for self-transcendence either to intensify the ego and consolidate the social persona by some kind of conspicuous embarkation and heroic conquest, or...”

“He didn't know all that much about how the machinery worked anyway. Such knowledge was for specialists. In war, as in love, he was a fearless, happy-go-lucky adventurer.”

“If she did experience sex--or something close to it--in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity.”