[Nelson, re. Annabelle] ..."she wants what everybody wants. She wants love." - John Updike

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.

[A grandchild barely able to remember Harry's own mother] But can Ma be no more than that in this child's memory? Do we dwindle so fast to next to nothing?

Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it has driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief. There is no God; Janice can die: the two thoughts come at once, in one slow wave. He feels underwater, caught in chains of transparent slime, ghosts of the urgent ejaculations he has spat into the mild bodies of women. His fingers on his knees pick at persistent threads.