As I get off the bus, a couple is walking past the stop. 'Hello! Hello! Do you have a cigarette?' shouts the woman, waving her hands.

I tell her that I don't smoke.

'Thank you,' says the man, 'I wish I could sleep with you tonight.'

Do I want your arm there on the back of the seat, o man on the bus?

No I do not.

Drafts!

'Every word they say chagrins us and we know not where to begin to set them right.'

'con men guessing at the dreams of the customers'

'Those, then, were Hans Castorp's favorite recordings.'

Carrying my usual bag, a bag of books, and a bag of groceries, I walked past a little boy. He asked his mother: 'Is that the mailman?'

'There are questions we could never get past, were it not that we are freed from them by nature.'

A previous reader has left a gray cut-out paper heart in the library's copy of the German Library volume of Kant's writings, starting at the page beginning the 'Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View'.