““Time to get up,” he informed her. “Don’t you hear the Almighty bellowing in the living room?”
“What’s he saying?” Marsha murmured crossly.
“Nothing in particular. Repent or suffer eternal damnation. The usual tribal tub-thumping.””

“It’s all right,” the boy murmured as he felt her trembling. “My grandmother always told me ‘Never try to turn back on a new road—you don’t know what adventures await you.”

“When a reviewer says that Malamud is second only to Bellow, it means he really isn't thinking about either of them. When he's reading Malamud he's thinking about Bellow, and when he's reading Bellow he's thinking about Roth. This is the essence of the ratings game: distraction. Children play it all the time. "Is this the biggest bridge in the world?" "No, it's the third biggest." "Oh."”

“Please excuse Jason from eternal damnation. He has had amnesia.”

“Father says it will come in time. “Time heals,” he says.
I don’t tell him that I don’t know what time is.”

“You come back and you do it right now," Morgead bellowed in her ears and in her mind. "Right now! Do you hear me?”

“All or nothing at all, the true lover says, and that’s the truth of it. My love will never die, he says. He claims eternity. And rightly. How can it die when it’s life itself? What do we know of eternity but the glimpse we get of it when we enter in that bond?”

“"My field," said Goethe, "is time." That is indeed the absurd speech. What, in fact, is the Absurd Man? He who, without negating it, does nothing for the eternal. Not that nostalgia is foreign to him. But he prefers his courage and his reasoning. The first teaches him to live without appeal and to get along with what he has; the second informs him of his limits. Assured of his temporally limited freedom, of his revolt devoid of future, and of his mortal consciousness, he lives out his adventure within the span of his lifetime.”

“It's not what he says, it is how he says it that is making the difference. He doesn't scream at you, he doesn't embarrass you when you make a mistake. He just looks at you, and you get the message. Then when the time is right, he'll talk to you calmly and explain what he wants.”

“Nicias, do you think you can erase with good deeds the wrongs you committed against your mother? What good deed will ever reach her? Her soul is a scorching noon time, without a single breath of a breeze, nothing moves, nothing changes, nothing lives there; a great emaciated sun, an immobile sun eternally consumes her.”