“You get tired of always wondering anew why life has to take the place of youth.”

“A calendar was hung in the kitchen as if to say: Expect more of the same.”

“I had to piece together a diet for her, too. I knew which combinations of which foods on which days would rehang everything that was draped so delicately beneath her skin. In a matter of months, the body under the smock was organized anew, redistributed”

“They weren't hours, these classes; they weren't even forty-five minutes--they were "periods," which sounded to me as if they were each at once a little era and then the end you had to see decisively put to it.”

“You get tired of always wondering anew why life has to take the place of youth.”

“Here is a story in the worst way. I have no business being anywhere in it. It comes between me and the life I have coming.”