When time passes, it’s the people who knew you whom you want to see; they’re the ones you can talk to. When enough time passes, what’s it matter what they did to you?
Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We’re screwed down here-for life!
He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.
In a school community, someone who reads a book for some secretive purpose, other than discussing it, is strange. What was she reading for?
Just because you’re sober, don’t think you’re a good driver, Cookie.
O God – please give him back! I shall keep asking You.
People are either attracted to the unseemly or disapproving of it, or both; yet we try to sound superior to the unseemly by pretending to be amused by it or indifferent to it.
Whereas she wished more of the population were better educated, she also believed that education was largely wasted on the majority of the people she met.
He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.
Being reviewed is being condescended to by your inferiors.
Kids are perfect people till grownups get their hands on them.
Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can’t even remember having met you.
Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.
I don’t want you to describe to me – not ever – what you were doing to that poor boy to make him sound like that; but if you ever do it again, please cover his mouth with your hand.
The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child.
It was one of those ridiculous arrangements that couples make when they are separating, but before they are divorced – when they still imagine that children and property can be shared with more magnanimity than recrimination.
People only ask questions when they’re ready to hear the answers.
This was not of the nature of a Christlike lesson for Owen Meany to learn, as he lay in the manger, that someone you hate can give you a hard-on.
You can give yourself a headache trying to decipher the tattoos on a naked man who’s leaping up and down on a bed.
She sat keenly white and still among them, a witness to everything – maybe determining nothing, possibly judging it all.