She was trying to look tough and careless, but she just looked scared. He says he wanted to laugh, and, at the same time, something in her frightened eyes made him want to cry.

He was an olive-skinned, curly-haired, merry-faced boy from the Bronx, about thirty-three, maybe, with big, kind of electrical black eyes, and he dug us.

One of the most terrible, most mysterious things about a life is that a warning can be heeded only in retrospect: too late.

He is young, very, very young, but also very old; but not old in the way that she had expected him to be. She had expected the age of corruption.

She is confronting the age of sorrow. She is confronting torment.