For lovers, touch is metamorphosis. All the parts of their bodies seem to change, and they seem to become something different and better.

My God, the suburbs! They encircled the city's boundaries like enemy territory and we thought of them as a loss of privacy, a cesspool of conformity and a life of indescribable dreariness in some split-level village where the place name appeared in the New York Times only when some bored housewife blew off her head with a shotgun.

I've been homesick for countries I've never been, and longed to be where I couldn't be.

Alice Malloy had dark, stringy hair, and even her husband, who loved her more than he knew, was sometimes reminded by her lean face of a tenement doorway on a rainy day, for her countenance was long, vacant, and weakly lighted, a passage for the gentle transports and miseries of the poor.

Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil - not the strength to choose between the two.

Love with its paraphernalia of sexuality, jealousy, nostalgia and exaltation was easier to reognize than friendship, which seemed to have (excepting athletic equipment) no paraphernalia at all.

How can a people who do not mean to understand death hope to understand love, and who will sound the alarm?