To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a nothingness. Here and now is what we must contend with.

His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat.

How far does a pretence of feeling, maintained with absolute conviction, become authentic?

Sade has a curious ability to render every aspect of sexuality suspect, so that we see how the chaste kiss of the sentimental lover differs only in degree from the vampirish love-bite that draws blood, we understand that a disinterested caress is only quantitatively different from a disinterested flogging.

Stars on our door, stars in our eyes, stars exploding in the bits of our brains where the common sense should have been

There was a house we all had in common and it was called the past, even though we'd lived in different rooms.

It shone on everyone, whether they had a contract or not. The most democratic thing I'd ever seen, that California sunshine.