And all because, in a sentimentally lonely time long ago, she had found it easy and agreeable to believe whatever this one particular boy felt like saying, and to repay him for that pleasure by telling easy, agreeable lies of her own, until each was saying what the other most wanted to hear...

Everybody’s essentially alone’, she’d told him, and he was beginning to see a lot of truth in that. Besides: now that he was older, and now that he was home, it might not even matter how the story turned out in the end.

Oh, Jesus, it was the loveliest and most terrible thing he’d ever seen; it was the source of the world; and his shame was so immediate that he let the fabric slip back into place after only a second or two.

I’m sure it’s probably a mistake to try and draw your own conclusions from the things you read in books. Who knows?

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

On their right, in a black marsh, the spring peepers were in full and desperate song.

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

Every man has a right to keep his own sentiments if he pleases.

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

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?