“Sincerity charged her every word like a bombshell that she launched in numbers amounting to a blitzkrieg he was powerless to withstand. She blew him all to pieces.”

“Vaclav has said goodnight to Lena every night since the night she went away. Out loud. In a whisper. [...] He filled the words with all his love and care and worry for Lena and launched them out to her, and like homing pigeons, he trusted them to find her.”

“The amount that she loved us was beyond her reach. It could not be quantified or contained. It was the ten thousand named things in the Tao Te Ching’s universe and then ten thousand more. Her love was full-throated and all-encompassing and unadorned. Every day she blew through her entire reserve.”

“To tell the truth, this was one of the few cases in which she had not told him just what she was thinking. Usually, she let him know whatever thoughts happened to come to her, and indeed he never took it amiss if she let slip a word that might pain him, because when all was said and done that was the price one paid for sincerity.”

“The collar represented something of big importance to her. He knew she saw it as losing who she was. He saw it as her trusting him enough to let him be in charge.”

“She had been hesitant the first night, right before she had launched into him like a wild animal. The imprint of her violence had lasted on him well until the morning and while he had been hurt, he had loved the fact that she was into him, that she lusted after him fanatically, that she scratched him, wept on him, bit him and he was grateful that she let him see her like that: unhinged, throbbing and warm-skinned. She was powerful and thus ironically all the more defenceless in surrender. At times he felt as though she truly hated him, hated him for making her feel like this, for having to condescend herself just by wanting him. He felt as though she was warning him constantly through her seething, hurtling silence; to not let her down after she had disclosed so much of her soul to him. Her insecurities, her memories, her fetishes, her scent, her limbs; they had all been laid-bare in front of him and as he lay there next to the girl whose chest heaved and fell like the meter of a ghazal, he fell in love with that girl and her bundle of contradictions.’('Left from Dhakeshwari')”