"William I’m sorry I let my brother hoist you up the mast in that crappy jury-rigged bosun’s chair while everybody laughed! William I’m sorry I could build better fires than you could! I’m sorry my stack of Christmas cards was always bigger than yours! … William I’m sorry I invented bop jogging which you couldn’t do! I’m sorry I loved Antigua! I’m sorry my mind wandered when you talked about the army! I’m sorry I was superior in argument! I’m sorry you slit open my bicycle tires looking for incriminating letters that you didn’t find! You’ll never find them! … William! I’m sorry I looked at Sam but he was so handsome, so handsome, who could not! I’m sorry I slept with Sam! I’m sorry about the library books! I’m sorry about Pete! I’m sorry I never played the guitar you gave me! I’m sorry I married you and I’ll never so it again!"

“People always like to hear that they’re under stress, makes them feel better. You can imagine what they’d feel if they were told they weren’t under stress.”

““Shouldness is being flouted here,” said Launcelot. “Shouldness is perhaps self-explanatory, but I have never seen it adequately dealt with, either in print or in the lecture hall. When that huntress got me in the bum with an arrow, it was an offense to shouldness. It shouldn’t have gone that way. I told the story to Sir Roger, and now he never tires of telling it, tells it to everyone who comes down the pike. That a knight of the Round Table could be pierced in that way by a female has a significance quite apart from the ludicrous. It’s in the realm of those things which should not happen—a category which holds much philosophical interest, as anyone who has ever looked into anomaletics will recognize. The insult to my dignity was not nearly so grave as the insult to shouldness.”

“As a magician works with the unique compressibility of doves, finding some, losing others in the same silk foulard, so the rebels fold scratchy, relaxed meanings into their smallest actions.”

“It's true," Carl said, "with a kind of merde-y inner truth which shines forth as the objective correlative of what actually did happen, back home.”

“Who among us is not thinking about divorce, except for a few tiny-minded stick-in-the-muds who don’t count?”

“Instant gratification is not as good as that gratification which comes dripping slow, over the sere seasons.”