She liked the salty taste of contradiction on her tongue.

For one of us at least, we knew, we were certain – this is how we saw the world – there would never again be loneliness in life.

It had been raining, that gray, unpoetic rain of midwinter in a dreary suburb.

There was... her capacity to believe. There was as well her capacity to be deceived, since you can’t have one without the other...

There was tremendous affection in Billy’s eyes, or at least they held a tremendous offer of affection, a tremendous willingness to find whomever he was talking to bright and witty and better than most.

The owner’s wife gave me a container of chicken soup and a quart of rice pudding to take home. She was a broad, solid woman with thick arms and legs. She swiped vigorously at the stain on my coat with a wad of dampened paper towel, and I remembered Pegeen then: There’s always someone nice.

It’s sometimes more torment for a man, Mr. Fagin said, to consider what might have been than to live with what is.

The devil loves these short, dark days.

Isn’t it funny how we all die at the same time? Always at the end of our lives. Why worry?

This was, I thought, the language of shy men, men too much alone with their reading and their ideas – politics, war, distant countries, tyrants. Men who would bury their heads in such stuff just to avert their eyes from a woman’s simple heartache.