In avoiding specific goals he had avoided specific limitations. For the time being the world, life itself, could be his chosen field.

She just happened to feel like it. Wasn’t that after all, the only reason there was? Had she ever had a less selfish, more complicated reason for doing anything in her life?

Warren Cox, God knew, was no prize; a commercial person, a sales person, the kind of man who said things like "x numbers of dollars". At lunch today, laboriously trying to explain some business procedure, he had said "x number of dollars" three times.

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

He couldn't even tell whether he was angry or contrite, whether it was forgiveness he wanted or the power to forgive.

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.

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