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

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

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

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

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 great wisdom for writers, perhaps for everybody, is to come to understand to be at one with their own tempo.

she kept sliding down, in small half-willing surrenders, till she was a heap, with the book held tiringly above her face.