"She was a city child and she knew about cocktails and hangovers."

"...at the age of nine I could appreciate this perfectly..."

"She was as wrinkled as an old paper bag, an autocrat, hard-shelled and jesuitical, a pouncy old hawk of a Bolshevik, her small ribboned gray feet immobile on the shoekit and stool whose bad smell filled the flat on the cushion beside her. If wit and discontent don’t necessarily go together, it wasn’t from the old woman that I learned it. She was impossible to satisfy. Kreindl, for example, on whom we could depend, Kreindl who carried up the coal when Mama was sick and who instructed Kotzie to make up our prescriptions for nothing, she called “that trashy Hungarian,” or “Hungarian pig.” She called Kotzie “the baked apple”; she called Mrs. Kreindl “the secret goose,” Lubin “the shoemaker’s son,” the dentist “the butcher,” the butcher “the timid swindler.” She detested the dentist, who had several times unsuccessfully tried to fit her with false teeth. She accused him of burning her gums when taking the impressions. But then she tried to pull his hands away from her mouth. I saw that happen: the stolid, square-framed Dr. Wernick, whose compact forearms could have held off a bear, painfully critical with her, determined, concerned at her choked screams, and enduring her scratches. To see her struggle like that was no easy thing for me, and Dr. Wernick was sorry to see me there too, I know, but either Simon or I had to squire her wherever she went. Here particularly she needed a witness to Wernick’s cruelty and clumsiness as well as a shoulder to lean on when she went weakly home. Already at ten I was only a little shorter than she and big enough to hold her small weight..."

"I was between twelve and thirteen, and I wanted to think of myself as a man."

"He was twenty-eight years old; poverty and youth were inseparable in his experience..."

"My wife, Helen, is thirty-eight, and her hair would be gray, I guess, if it were not dyed..."

"She was now forty-one, and, although rather plump, she looked frequently much younger..."

"I’m forty-two years old. I’m spoilt by independence..."

"Merely to look at him was to think of middle age. Few other men in the world, of his years, which amounted to fifty-one, could have given forth this impression so strongly and quickly..."

"I’m fifty-four years old and I’ve never given you guys anything yet. I’ll be dead first..."

"Major Parry was fifty-five, and, like Gorse’s friend Ronnie, he drank and talked and thought about women in a silly way too much..."

"Among the new arrivals was a dignified, white-haired man of seventy named Bob Riordan, an old-time con-man, junk pusher, and pickpocket..."