And death? I don't fear death. I dread the absence of it.

The attacking piece displaces its victim. The vanquished piece leaves the plane of the board entirely. But it does not, in a higher sense, cease to exist.

Does it strike you, Mr. Keller, that we live every day in the science fiction of our youth?

It was the kind of experience, Molly said, that would grow calluses on an angel's ass.

The conversation was mesmerizing, not for its content but for the cadences of the talk, the rhythm we fell into when we were alone, now as before. Every conversation between friends or lovers creates its own easy or awkward rhythms, hidden talk that runs like a subterranean river under even the most banal exchange.

The world is what it is and won't be bargained with.

An honest book is almost as good as a friend.