“I found myself wishing that we could live like the birds and move through nature without hurting it ourselves.”

“It was some time since I had gone to sleep in the same room with a girl. Of course, the room was large and reasonably well-lighted, and the girl had other things than me on her mind.”

“The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.”

“The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.”

“Try listening to yourself sometime, alone in a transient room in a strange town. The worst is when you draw a blank, and the ash-blonde ghosts of the past carry on long twittering long-distance cal...”

“The past was filling the room like a tide of whispers.”

“Prostitution has the same relationship to trafficking as sex has to rape. One is voluntary, the other is not”

“The man at the end of the bar was looking at me. ... Should I get drunk and sleep with him now? But I could see that I would regret that so much I would want to die after. I didn't want to get invo...”

“She didn't look like any motel manager I had ever seen. More likely an actress who hadn't quite made the grade down south, or a very successful amateur tart on the verge of turning pro. Whatever he...”

“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.”