Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents? Anything as hard to grasp as the fact that those two over-the-hill players, permanently on the disabled list, were once in the starting lineup? It's impossible to imagine my father, who in my experience was aroused mainly by the lowering of interest rates, suffering the acute, adolescent passions of the flesh.

and she had succeeded, on the second try, in hurling herself out of the world

There are some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things.

But I care about the reader, and I'm trying to keep the reader's attention for as long as I can.

Three times a day Petrovich showed up at the nurse's office for his injections, always using the hypodermic needle himself like the most craven of junkies, though after shooting up he would play the concert piano in the auditorium with astounding artistry, as though insulin were the elixir of genius.

A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts.

The essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back to where you begin.