I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor

I see you're looking at my cuff buttons." I hadn't been looking at them, but I did now.

I avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can.

The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun.

There’s a writer for you,” he said. “Knows everything and at the same time he knows nothing.” [narrator]It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writers—because if you ask a writer anything you usually get an answer—still it belittled him in my eyes. Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It’s like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying—only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

She smiled at him, making sure that the smile gathered up everything inside her and directed it toward him, making him a profound promise of herself for so little, for the beat of a response, the assurance of a complimentary vibration in him.

The helpless ecstasy of loosing himself in her charm was a powerful opiate rather than a tonic.