“I began to feel that all the people I'd ever known who had died or left me had not in fact gone away, but continued to live on inside me just as this man's wife lived on inside him.”

“As I watched Bill, waiting with apparent calm for death to come to him, I had a flash of him as I'd known him: the first vampire I'd ever met, the first man I'd ever gone to bed with, the first suitor I'd ever loved. Everything that followed had tainted those memories, but for one moment I saw him clearly, and I loved him again.”

“I live to feel her fingers move inside of me like this. The busmakes another stop. A fat man climbs aboard, hauling himself up the stairs. I would kill him for one more moment with her fingers inside me. I don’t have to. She gives me my moment for free. He lives because of her generosity. We all live because of her generosity.”

“I fell into a sound sleep and dreamed that I was at a banquet back in Gion, talking with an elderly man who was explaining to me that his wife, whom he'd cared for deeply, wasn't really dead because the pleasure of their time together lived on inside him.”

“When he'd pushed inside me and I'd feel him begin to penetrate, it had turned me into a wild thing-hot, wet, and desperate for more of him. With every kiss, every caress, every thrust, I'd just needed more. He'd touched me, I went nuts. The world dwindled down to one thing: him.”

“I wondered at him, so wise and so foolish, to have lived with me all these months and not know that the worst storms break inside a man.”