“Mills & Boon and Harlequins are like colourful jelly beans, you can't get enough of...”

“On the roof, on the duvet under the steam vent, with the planets overhead, he let her scream all she wished. She screamed into the night. To the stars. At one point, with his lying atop her, he said, “Look over my left shoulder. Venus is visible tonight.” Then he pulled the covers away from her, wrestling her for the duvet, as he called, “Here she is, all you Venusians”—he lifted out his arm, using it to span the celestial horizon-—“and the rest of you planets out there: the most beautiful woman on Earth, spread-eagled for your pleasure!” He laughed. “At my disposal, mm-m-m!” He bent down, nibbling, kissing her neck with his teeth, his lips, his mouth.”

“Yey more and more there seemed a bevy of things she was not supposed to think about and by virtue of trying not to, she hardly thought of anything else.”

“We humans need one another. We live in a big house with many rooms. Right now our home is on fire. If you're going to try to put out the fire, you've got to first agree on one fundamental point--everyone in the house is worth saving.”

“To make a lacy texture of holes and fills, turn around and purl. Pearl is also a kind of colour. Colours are all the colours of the rainbow and the colours between the rainbow colours between. I can never get indigo. Year after year, I wait for indigo, but even when the fashion is navy, you never get indigo, the glow, the long slow glow of indigo in the high night sky.”

“Very softly as he nuzzled her, his mouth near her ear, he began to sing: "I'm so happy with you, la, la...”

“I have these secret pangs of shame about being single, like I wasn't good enough to get a husband. Rita reminded me of something I'd told her once, about the five rules of the world as arrived at by this Catholic priest named Tom Weston. The first rule, he says, is that you must not have anything wrong with you or anything different. The second one is that if you do have something wrong with you, you must get over it as soon as possible. The third rule is that if you can't get over it, you must pretend that you have. The fourth rule is that if you can't even pretend that you have, you shouldn't show up. You should stay home, because it's hard for everyone else to have you around. And the fifth rule is that if you are going to insist on showing up, you should at least have the decency to feel ashamed.So Rita and I decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do was to show up for my life and not be ashamed.”