By the time we left college, I had become my own image: a dandelion in the flower bed of society. Kinda cute, but still a weed.

She laughed out loud, a warm, knowing laughter that made me once again wonder about the secret ingredient in these women’s lives. Whatever it was, I was clearly missing it. It was so much more than just self-confidence; it seemed to be the ability to love oneself, enthusiastically and unsparingly, body and soul, naturally followed by the assumption that every man on the planet is dying to get in on the act.

You owe me nothing, but I want everything.

I’ll be back tomorrow,” he said, “at nine o’clock. Don’t open your door to anyone else.” “Not even my balcony door?” “Especially not your balcony door.

Great love, you believe, carries the seeds of great sorrow. Well, perhaps you are right. Perhaps the wise spurn one to remain safe from the other, but I should rather choose to have my eyes burnt in their sockets than to have been born without.

There is lust and then there is love. They are related, but still very different things. To indulge in one requires little but honeyed speech and a change of clothes; to obtain the other, by contrast, a man must give up his rib. In return, his woman will undo the sin of Eve, and bring him back into Paradise.

When the old men fight, the young people die.