As a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake.

You try, you seem totally nuts, you go underground.

…kissing George was a little like rolling in caramel after spending years surviving off rice sticks.

My eyelids are my own private cave, he murmured. That I can go to anytime I want.

I knew if I ate anything of hers again, it would lkely tell me the same message: help me, I am not happy, help me -- like a message in a bottle sent in each meal to the eater, and I got it. I got the message.

I don't think so, I don't agree. The most unbearable thing I think by far, she said, is hope.

But what I kept wondering about is this: that first second when she felt her skirt burning, what did she think? Before she knew it was candles, did she think she'd done it herself? With the amazing turns of her hips, and the warmth of the music inside her, did she believe, for even one glorious second, that her passion had arrived?