"I am not a concert pianist," snapped Mrs. Zelenko. "And that's why I can play Bach. When I play, it's as though Bach is listening, Bach himself, not twelve hundred yawning potbellied mink-coated perfumed idiots who don't know a piano from a ukulele."
"I love you. Don't you understand, you little torturer? You've executed the vengeance of your non-existent God on me."
-Do you think you'll marry again?
-No.
-That's nice and definite.
-Might as well live out the sunset this way.
-Sunset indeed! Thirty nine.
-I've outlived Keats, Mozart, Marlowe, Alexander the Great, and Jesus. I'm satisfied.
"Unfortunately, Marjorie, so far as I'm concerned, expressions like 'neurotic anxiety' are just educated noise. Who really knows what the affliction is, what it comes from, what it means? It's like a wart. You can describe it and you can treat it empirically, which is a three-dollar word for 'by guess and by God.' "
