"He's scattered, his sentences trail off, he sighs frequently, as though he's so intelligent he's always frustrated by…"

"Perhaps we'd understood each other too well to be attracted to one another. There were no occlusions in communication…"

"In return for the costliness and inconvenience, the squalor and discomfort of our lives, we get to participate in wha…"

"Being up on something is a way of dismissing it. To espouse any point of view is a danger — it might leave us stuck w…"

"Sometimes I look at the battered exteriors of apartment buildings in New York and think how these sorry shells have h…"

"Do we regard language as more public, more ceremonial, than thought? Just as family men condemn the profanity on the …"

"All his leisure clothes were absurd — jokes, really — as though leisure itself had to be ridiculed."

"Characters — conventional women with minor eccentricities — flourished in our world, as Mrs. Cork had no doubt observ…"

"We lived one year in a suburb so new it was still being built in fields of red clay: a neat grid of streets named aft…"

"I am, I must confess, suspicious of those who denounce others for having "too much" sex. At what point does a "health…"