There was the noise itself, which he thought of vaguely as the noise of classical music, sameish and rhetorical, full of feelings people surely never had

I like things to reverberate, to be suggestive.

Now that I had actually made love, more astonishingly now that I had been made love to, the fantasies were subtly undermined.

What the problem was was this colossal redundancy, the squandering of brilliant technique on cheap material.

To apologize for what you most wanted to do, to concede that it was obnoxious, boring, 'vulgar and unsafe' --- that was the worst thing.

The worse they are the more they see beauty in each other.

...all his longings came out as a kind of disdain for what he longed for.