“The story of Adam and Eve has less to do with evil than the cosmic human sadness that relationships are never straightforward, never pure enough.”

“Sex is a kind of alchemy. It's the one thing other than death that if used properly can change everything, like that first night with Madison, it's all in my head like a beautiful dream. I remember her skin. Its texture made me believe I'd never die.”

“Relationships are like wall paper patterns, you think your moving forward but your always caught in your own obsessions.”

“The problem with being a modern woman, I thought, as the front door swung wide, is that you have to pretend to be stronger than you are.”

“What is love but a nostalgia for someones history? Their boyhood haunts and sullen adolescence, their teenage trips cross-country and fights with their fathers and especially their old lovers?”

“Everything was new, now I’m a junkie, I seem to need more severe doses of experience to feel anything.”

“For awhile, staring at my paper bag of clothes, my freaked-out eyes in the mirror behind the bar, I convinced myself I would go back to Bell. He was the only man that ever made me feel in life instead of just a spectator, and if he did that by fear and pain, it was still better then when I looked numbly at some man on the couch thinking, I will leave you soon.”