“what a frail, easily hurt, rather pathetic thing a human body is, naked; somehow a little unfinished, incomplete!”

“They are so frail humans. So easily crumpled and broken, like flower petals under foot.”

“His defences were all in his wits and cunning, his very instincts of cunning, and when these were abeyance he seemed doubly naked and like a child, of unfinished, tender flesh, and somehow struggling helplessly”

“The ways I could hurt her and hurt myself. Those two things were intertwined somehow. It's hard to explain, but when you were as closed off as I was the past few months, opening felt as wrong as stripping naked in church.”

“What it comes down to, you see, is that a naked body is just a naked body.But the possibility of a naked body is something special.”

“What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world? The voice of Macedonio Fernandez, the image of a bay horse in a vacant lot on the corner of Sarrano and Charcas, a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?”