“Yancey crawled from her tangled bed one morning and assembled her long limbs and sharp bones into something as exotic and seductive to the eye as a peacock or a griffin or a unicorn.”

“The kind of eyes that jumped from a woman's dreams right into her morning and made trouble in the marriage bed.”

“No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs - this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into language.”

“Her makeup artist, Allan Snyder, recalled applying her makeup in the morning while she was still flat on her back in bed. “There was no other way,” he said. “It would take her so long to get up in the morning, we had to start with the makeup before she was out of bed.”

“She ran her hands over her body as if to bid it good-bye. The hipbones rising from a shrunken stomach were razor-sharp. Would they be lost in a sea of fat? She counted her ribs bone by bone. Where would they go?”

“Then I pulled off her boots, desperate to enter our world of touch and skin, trailed fingers, that strange elation of lovemaking where the body of another can lift you from your own mortal flesh and put you at some height above a bed of twisted sheets and tangled limbs, with no way of knowing where one self starts and the other ends.”