He'd had the sense, moments earlier, that Caroline was on the verge of accusing him of being "depressed", and he was afraid that if the idea that he was depressed gained currency, he would forfeit his right to his opinions. He would forfeit his moral certainties; every word he spoke would become a symptom of disease; he would never again win an argument.
It was therefore all the more important now to resist depression - to fight it with the truth.

"Sometimes I get so excited thinking about my morning coffee," Mr. Söderblad said, "I can't fall asleep at night."

Oh, misanthropy and sourness. Gary wanted to enjoy being a man of wealth and leisure, but the country was making it none too easy. All around him, millions of newly minted American millionaires were engaged in the identical pursuit of feeling extraordinary-of buying the perfect Victorian, of skiing the virgin slope, of knowing the chef personally, of locating the beach that had no footprints. There were further tens of millions of young Americans who didn’t have money but were nonetheless chasing the Perfect Cool. And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary? Who would perform the thankless work of being comparatively uncool?

"There's a poached salmon in the fridge. A crème fraîche with sorrel. A salad with green beans and hazelnuts. You'll se the wine and baguette and the butter. It's good fresh butter from Vermont."

[...] he suspected that the minimum price of further conversation with her would be an overpriced lunch of mesquite-grilled autumn vegetables and a bottle of Sancerre for which he had no conceivable way of paying.

“So, what, you got cigarette burns, too?” Gitans said. Chip showed his palm, “It’s nothing.” “self-inflicted. You pathetic American.” “Different kind of prison,” Chip said.

She taught them how to make spinach pasta and how to tango.

She'd quit school and worked to save money for a year, had taken six months in France and Italy, and had returned to Philly to cook at a thronged fish-and-pasta place off Catharine Street.

In Denise's kitchen, after shopping, she peeled potatoes immaculately or rolled out simple doughs while the cook contrived lagniappes for a child's palate: wedges of pear, strips of homemade mortadella, elderberry sorbet in a doll-size bowl of elderberry soup, lambsmeat ravioli Xed with mint-charged olice oil, cubes of fried polenta.

He lowered the blinds and drank the wine, and brought himself off again and again, and ate two more cupcakes, detecting peppermint in them, a faint buttery peppermint, before he slept.