Women, once sex gets out in the open, they become monsters. You're a creep if you fuck them and a creep if you don't. - John Updike

[about the past, and Mary Ann, before Harry went to do his two years in the army] Maybe she sensed something about him. A loser. Though at eighteen he looked like a winner.

..."That disease he has does an awful job on you. Your lungs fill up."

To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.