“Somehow during their aimless but oh-so-significant conversation with its delicious pauses and thrilling undercurrents of emotion, they came to know that they loved each other passionately.”

“Romantic love is a passionate spiritual-emotional-sexual attachment between a man and a woman that reflects a high regard for the value of each other's person.”

“The food was so good that with each passing course, our conversation devolved further into fragmented celebrations of its deliciousness:'I want this dragon carrot risotto to become a person so I can take it to Las Vegas and marry it.”

“They talked aimlessly back and forth, each speaking for the other.”

“The obsession was gone. We liked each other, even loved each other. And our sex was still good, but the hunger was gone. Either it just wore out or we wore each other out. A passion like that pushes everything else out of its path. You can't be married and have jobs and children and work and write and have something like an emotional bubonic plague.”

“So quickly in youth do different and opposite trains of ideas and emotions succeed to each other; and so easy it is, by a timely exercise of reason and self-command, to prevent a fancy from becoming a passion.”