"Are we friends today?" she asked him. "There's a level, Justin, on which we're always friends. Then there's… — Robert S. Stone

"A little cinder in the wind, Pablo - that's what you are."

"Everybody's worth something," Pablo said. "I mean - everybody's life got some meaning to it. You know - there's a reason for people."

"No kidding? A reason for you? What is it?"

"I don't know," Pablo confessed. "I ain't found out yet. But I know there is one."

"The thing to do with embarrassment," he told the young American couple who seemed determined to engage him, "is work it all the way to humiliation."

With the thought came the recollection of a poem he had once heard read, about a mouse so frightened it went to the cat for love.