At fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon.

Want any of this stuff? Jordan?... Nick?" I didn't answer. Nick?" he asked again. What?" Want any?" No... I just remembered that today's my birthday." I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.

The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.

The kiss originated when the first male reptile licked the first female reptile, implying in a subtle way that she was as succulent as the small reptile he had for dinner the night before.

He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at by a man.

You have a place in my heart no one else ever could have.

I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.