“Within every elaborate lie, a kernel of truth.”

“The store was empty, without a single customer or employee. It appeared in the Internet age, pianos, like physical books, were fast becoming culturally extinct. Theyd probably stay that way unless ...”

“And that fear I'd felt, the disembodying confusion, seemed to be a drug I was now addicted to, because moving through the ordinary world- watching CNN, reading the Times, walking to Sant Ambroeus t...”

“When it was daylight, we'd been sitting on a stoop watching the street get light. She mentioned the light took eight minutes to leave the sun and reach us. You couldn't help but love that light tra...”

“I couldn't help but suspect something he'd seen or encountered had changed his view of what had happened between them. It had somehow set him free. And he'd let it fly, that gorgeous blackbird of a...”

“she was flighty and poor, a French studies major who quoted Simone de Beauvoir. She wiped her runny nose on her coat sleeve when it was snowing, stuck her head out of car windows the way dogs do, t...”

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”

“I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.”

“If your workplace was somehow transplanted into the jungle and everyone was forced to survive at a very primitive level, it's safe to say that eventually your boss would rape you.”

“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.”