He couldn't figure out if she was immensely well adjusted or seriously messed up.

Imagine that human existence is defined by an Ache: the Ache of our not being, each of us, the center of the universe; of our desires forever outnumbering our means of satisfying them.

It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.

The problem was money and the indignities of life without it. Every stroller, cell phone, Yankees cap, and SUV he saw was a torment. He wasn't covetous, he wasn't envious. But without money he was hardly a man.

...She felt that nothing could kill her hope now, nothing. She was seventy-five and she was going to make some changes in her life.

Fiction, I believed, was the transmutation of experiential dross into linguistic gold. Fiction meant taking up whatever the world had abandoned by the road and making something beautiful out of it.

If you want to have friends, you have to remember that nobody's perfect.