I am dead. I have no desire for you. My body no longer wants the one who doesn’t love.

He wanted to pay her; he thought women ought to be paid for keeping men from dying or going out of their minds.

In heterosexual love there's no solution. Man and woman are irreconcilable, and it's the doomed attempt to do the impossible, repeated in each new affair, that lends heterosexual love its grandeur.

Very early in my life it was too late.

I've known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you're more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.

Their voices reach out into the empty yard, plunge deep into the hills, go right through the heart.

A book consists of two layers: on top, the readable layer ... and underneath, a layer that was inaccessible. You only sense its existence in a moment of distraction from the literal reading, the way you see childhood through a child. It would take forever to tell what you see, and it would be pointless.