“She hadn’t caught me, obviously enough, at a very erotic moment in my life. I had never been much of a pickup artist–a few ghastly encounters in my twenties had seen to that–and the alternative prospect of a euphoric romance not only exhausted me but, in fact, struck me as impossible. This wasn’t because of any fidelity to my absent wife or some aversion to sex, which, I like to think, grabs me as much as the next man. No, it was simply that I was uninterested in making, as I saw it, a Xerox of some old emotional state. I was in my mid-thirties, with a marriage more or less behind me. I was no longer vulnerable to curiosity’s enormous momentum. I had nothing new to murmur to another on the subject of myself and not the smallest eagerness about being briefed on Danielle’s supposedly unique trajectory–a curve described under the action, one could safely guess, of the usual material and maternal and soulful longings, a few thwarting tics of character, and luck good and bad. A life seemed like an old story.”

                     --Joseph O'Neill, Netherland, 2008

“WINDOWS: BARRIERS TO ALL THE SENSES BUT SIGHT. EXTERNAL SIGHT, LOOKING OUT UPON THE NIGHTED SKYLINE OF LONDON, THE CITY IN WHICH I NOW LIVE, BUT A PLACE ALIEN TO MY BIRTH. AND INTERNAL SIGHT, THE WINDOW REFLECTING MY FACE AS ITS EXPRESSIONS REFLECT MY MIND’S MEMORIES… ”

                     --Doug Moench, MASTER OF KUNG FU, Vol. 1, No. 41, 
                            "The Murder Agency," 1976