A weapon men use against women is the refusal to take them seriously.

She was widely read enough to appreciate my literary wit but not so widely read that she knew my sources. I like that in a woman.

I understand now that boundaries between noise and sound are conventions. All boundaries are conventions, waiting to be transcended. One may transcend any convention if only one can first conceive of doing so.

As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory.

The healthy can't understand the emptied, the broken.

A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.

If only,’ Shiroyama dreams, ‘human beings were not masks behind masks behind masks. If only this world was a clean board of lines and intersections. If only time was a sequence of considered moves and not a chaos of slippages and blunders.