“Was there anything quite so painful, so fraught with the possibilities of hurt, as gift giving within a family?”

“Soon would come the night in which there was no more work not the work of the hands, nor the work of the mind, nor the work of the heart.”

“Still, for all that, her life had lacked passion. The demons had never come for her.”

“I think good conversation is really the best form of sex.”

“Education teaches children to lose interest in what matters most to them.”

“Just because you pretend the universe doesn't have teeth doesn't mean you won't get eaten in the end.”

“It is curious why anybody should pooh-pooh a study of fossils or various forms of rocks or lava. Such things grant us our only vision into Natural Historys big book; and it isn't a book in first-cl...”

“Self-preservation and determination meant she could get away with anything. As her law-abiding, conventionally minded daughter, I secretly envied her this. She was not the clinging-vine type, nor o...”

“I'm going to set up a Commission of Inquiry," said the Sow. "What's that?" asked Lorina."It's a way of putting things off, said the Sow, "in the hope that the problem will go away.”

“The Bay of Pigs became a metaphor for feckless folly and failure.”

“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.”