The advisor led me to the bathroom and toilets, running water through the basins and flushing a toilet to demonstrate thoroughness.

At last Helen rose and began to dress herself, selecting for the day a fawn outfit. She pulled on her Wellingtons and stowed away her town clothes in the wardrobe. Then she went to the window and drew up the Venetian blind.

In the beginning there was Ben, just Ben alone before Laura or Landis or the Spaniard, but before Ben there had been others living where Ben was to live. Living, cooking, eating, and burning lights in the middle of the night and descending and ascending the stairs and coming and going and taking their keys and putting them back again and paying their bills or not paying them and being quiet or noisy and predictable and erratic and walking the roof in spring.

We are at war and I am on a train leaving for the country.

I am troubled because I suspect it might be better to spend the war in the city.

Out the window I see soldiers cooking lunch in kitchen sinks and other unlikely containers.

No, no, said Miss Etta, putting three loops and a scallop to centre front, no no no, said Miss Etta, crossing behind and slipping two, no no, don’t tell me she didm’t mean it. Don't try to tell me she didn’t mean it, because I know she did, and she began the second row.

If it looked like a good long rain, Jan would set the basket inside the door and fly back out and down to the summerhouse under the big splashing drops before anyone had time to say come back or take your sweater

Mr. Bean and Mr. Muller were in the Coffee Cup sharing a grinder when the notion came to Mr. Bean to paint a lion. He got up at once without excusing himself and went to the hardware store 

I had been trained as a hospital technician in the army, and instead of the gleaming lab job uptown by which I had hoped to pay for graduate school, I was working in a defunct office building on the edge of the Lower East Side. 

He had not been desperate when he answered her ad in the paper. He had already lost two other sublets- the second because the tenant felt that he had an untrustworthy face, and told him so.