Book Highlights

• To sleep with a woman: it can seem of the utmost importance in your mind, or then again it can seem like nothing much at all. Which only goes to say that there’s sex as therapy (self-therapy, that is) and there’s sex as pastime. There’s sex for self-improvement start to finish and there’s sex for killing time straight through; sex that is therapeutic at first only to end up as nothing-better-to-do, and vice versa. Our human sex life—how shall I put it?—differs fundamentally from the sex life of the whale. We are not whales—and this constitutes one great theme underscoring our sex life.

• There’s no telling every last thing about someone’s life, no matter how boring.

• Nonetheless, we can in the same breath deny that there is any such thing as coincidence. What’s done is done, what’s yet to be is clearly yet to be, and so on. In other words, sandwiched as we are between the “everything” that is behind us and the “zero” beyond us, ours is an ephemeral existence in which there is neither coincidence nor possibility.

• the “everything” that is behind us and the “zero” beyond

• Say we have a concept. It goes without saying that there will be slight exceptions to that norm. Now, over time these exceptions spread like stains until finally they form a separate concept. To which other exceptions crop up.

• Time really is one big continuous cloth, no? We habitually cut out pieces of time to fit us, so we tend to fool ourselves into thinking that time is our size, but it really goes on and on.

• It comes down to the different ways in which minds work. What’s over for one person isn’t over for another. But the path splits in two different directions, and so you end up apart.

• attempt to build a neighborhood. Asphalt

• I replaced the receiver. What did she mean, she got the picture? I didn’t get the picture, but then again, there are lots of things I don’t know anything about. Age certainly hasn’t conferred any smarts on me. Character maybe, but mediocrity is a constant, as one Russian writer put it. Russians have a way with aphorisms. They probably spend all winter thinking them up.

• coiffed like whipped cream atop a cake. The coif swayed

• “You concentrate on waiting for someone and after a certain time it hardly matters what happens anymore. It could be five years or ten years or one month. It’s all the same.”

• existence is communication, and communication, existence.

• “To a greater or lesser extent, everybody’s always being ordered and threatened and pushed around. There may not be anything better we could hope for.”

• “Everybody has some one thing they do not want to lose,” began the man. “You included. And we are professionals at finding out that very thing. Humans by necessity must have a midway point between their desires and their pride. Just as all objects must have a center of gravity. This is something we can pinpoint. Only when it is gone do people realize it even existed.”

• There’s that kind of money in the world. It aggravates you to have it, makes you miserable to spend it, and you hate yourself when it’s gone. And when you hate yourself, you feel like spending money. Except there’s no money left. And no hope.

• With the job out of the picture, I felt a surge of relief. Slowly but surely I was making things simpler. I’d lost my hometown, lost my teens, lost my wife, in another three months I’d lose my twenties. What’d be left of me when I got to be sixty, I couldn’t imagine. There’s no thinking about these things. There’s no telling even what’s going to happen a month from now.

• “Hmm,” she said. “I do like the word ‘we,’ though. It has an Ice Age ring to it.” “Ice Age?” “Like ‘We go south’ or ‘We hunt mammoth’ or …”

• Accurate figures give things a sense of reality.