“Life starts out with everyone clapping when you take a poo and goes downhill from there. ”

“I was stunned. I pulled the phone away and looked quizzically at the hole-punched speaker. Aside from the blood obligation to be my sister's maid of honor, it had never occured to me that I would g...”

“The only bit I have pictured in any detail is the music (maybe 'The Book of Love' by the Magnetic Fields. Or Johnny Cash's 'It Ain't Me, Babe'). It doesn't matter if the selection is slow or fast, ...”

“I got out on the street and started crying the kind of hysterical tears made justifiable only by turning off ones cell phone, putting it to the ear, and pretending to be told of a death in the family.”

“Its remarkable the logic we build around a misapprehension.”

“I never asked my mother where babies came from but I remember clearly the day she volunteered the information....my mother called me to set the table for dinner. She sat me down in the kitchen, and...”

“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.”