I really did believe that I loved the boy with the cheekbones, although looking back, it's clear how much lust played a part. "Do you have a husband?" Mel asks. He doesn't say, as anyone else would, "Are you married?" He makes having a husband sound like owning a pet.
""Somebody offered me a part in a movie." "Why?" she asked, somehow managing to squeeze two syllables out of one word, in the manner of teen actresses in the sitcoms that Harry denied watching. Harry was disappointed by the question. Wasn't a daughter supposed to think her father could do anything? Every time Harry thought he had the hang of having a daughter, he was back at square one."
Lilly did appreciate facts. She appreciated that the sun was 93 million miles from the earth, that the Empire State Building was 1,250 feet tall, that the human brain weighed three pounds, that E=mc2. She did not appreciate the fact that her mother had decided to kill herself because Lilly was unable to conceive a child.
The subject of Johny Boy is on the tip of her tongue. She knows that confronting Aaron would be the most honorable. But it would give him an opportunity to invent a clever lie,...She'd have to check every website constantly because she would never know whether he was back working one of them.
"And even as she reached for it, the letter, she wondered why she should read what any of the two of them had to say. But still she opened up the crisp white piece of paper,...and she read a little of what they had to say...the bile continually on the rise in her mouth. Something about the two of them being in love."
"For the first few nights, I woke up in the dark screaming and Mama would lie down with me until I fell asleep again. In the daytime, I kept searching the street hoping to see Irina and the boys coming to take me back to the village...But nobody came..."
"Just take a look at the Biography rack at your local bookstore and you'll see a shitload of those tell-all tomes from Paris in the 20s and 30s. All of them lies. Lies. Lies. So I figure now's the time to set the record straight and if Joseph M. Kelly don't do it, who the hell will?"
"Ray was dangerous. He was volatile and he had killed men in combat (or so the rumors said) and he was admired on campus because of the novels he had written about war and because he had an international reputation and he always got respectful reviews... How did such a one ever get on the faculty at all? And tenured too! Ridiculous."
"Face, Professor Ketch knew, was important to a Thai, and losing it publicly, with outbursts of anger, was damaging. Open-mouthed, he pointed toward the door and moved awkwardly in its direction."
"The drinks are up for my other tables, so I serve them first -- a couple of giggly soccer moms, yakking over strawberry daiquiris, and this guy that looks like Jack Nicholson -- those evil eyebrows – he's on his fifth vodka martini, straight up, very dry with a twist. Sasha has brought Pudgy and gay guy a basket of oyster crackers, and I take my tray of dirty dishes to the bar before going over."