"The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin."

"It was the day my grandmother exploded."

"America, said Horace, the office temp, was a run-down and demented pimp."

"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."

"I get the willies when I see closed doors."

"When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon."

"Was it the bourbon or the dye fumes that made the pink walls quiver like vaginal lips?"

"Let me tell you why I wished to buy a meerkat at Quin's Shanghai Circus."

"He - for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it - was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters."

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

"I write this sitting in the kitchen sink."

"Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo."

"Psychics can see the color of time it’s blue."

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents - except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

"Where now? Who now? When now?"

"Take my camel, dear," said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.

"What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings?"

"Either forswear fucking others or the affair is over."

"Monday morning when I answered the door there were twenty-one new real estate agents there, all in horrible polyester gold jackets."

"I am bit by fleas and plagued by family."

"I was in my makeshift darkroom above the garage developing my umpteenth print of Peter Terris, an individual of full-orbed gorgeousness who needs absolutely no retouching, an individual oozing with classic tones and highlights who barely knew that I was alive."

"The magic in that country was so thick and tenacious that it settled over the land like calk-dust and over floors and shelves like slightly sticky plaster-dust."

"Four days after his own funeral, Albert Wilkes came home to tea."

"One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary."

" - Money…in a voice that rustled."