If you haven't written a novel by the time you're forty you never will!

The Revolutionary Hill Estates had not been designed to accommodate a tragedy. Even at night, as if on purpose, the development held no looming shadows and no gaunt silhouettes. It was invincibly cheerful, a toyland of white and pastel houses whose bright, uncurtained windows winked blandly through a dappling of green and yellow leaves … A man running down these streets in desperate grief was indecently out of place.

Anybody's marriage might benefit from an occasional embargo on talk.

You're painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture.

It's a disease. Nobody thinks or feels or cares any more; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity.

Know what we did, Lucy? You and me? We spent our whole lives yearning. Isn't that the God damndest thing?

Dying for love might be pitiable, but it wasn't much different, finally, from any other kind of dying.