“i see that you laugh rarely though you could be naturally joyful , you control your features , and you fear on the presence of men to smile too cheerfully , speak too freely or move too quickly.”

“Poetry can unleash a terrible fear. I suppose it is the fear of possibilities, too many possibilities, each with its own endless set of variations. It's like looking too closely and too long into a mirror; soon your features distort, then erupt. You look too closely into your poems, or listen too closely to them as they arrive in whispers, and the features inside you - call it heart, call it mind, call it soul - accelerate out of control. They distort and they erupt, and it is one strange pain. You realize, then, that you can't attempt breaking down too many barriers in too short a time, because there are as many horrors waiting to get in at you as there are parts of yourself pushing to break out, and with the same, or more, fevered determination.”

“I’m too selfish to leave you,” I said. Noah pulled back so I could see his smile. “I’m too selfish to let you.”

“Was life like that? You could look ahead to the future or back to the past, but the present moved too quickly to absorb.”

“Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame... at your past, which naturally has a share with everything that now meets you.”

“You belong in Orchis House because you love to laugh in bed. Sex and love are both sources of great joy to you, and you're not too picky about it, as long as you can enjoy yourself, and enjoy your lover. You know how to bestow joy in sex, because that's what you want from your lover, too.”