“The best sex takes us somewhere. Somewhere warm and expansive, a paradise of lust and happiness. Sex is and can be and should be but only very rarely is an act of communion with something bigger than ourselves. Men fuck and women make love, people say, but we men make love when we fuck a woman we adore: it’s the same thing to us. We mean it sincerely. I had places inside me only Cathy could fill with her body, and I made her happy with my body more than I ever thought I could.”

“I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.”

“We all fuck up when it comes to our women and you will too. The key is to make her love you more than you piss her off,” Jason added. “It’s a very delicate balance.”

“I still can't help but love Sienna, though, I adore her. looking at her still makes me melt somewhere deep in my soul. Her presence lifts me up more than anyone else I know. Thinking about her fills me with happiness. What we have is unique. But I have accepted that she will never be mine, so I have to just love her from a distance and move on. It's working. It really is. I am finally achieving peace.”

“If I had two lives, in one life I could invite her to stay at my place, and in the second life I could kick her out. Then I could compare and see which had been the best thing to do. But we only live once. Life's so light. Like an outline we can't ever fill in or correct... make any better. It's frightening".”

“we had sex in every position i could imagine, and some i couldn't. we had sex in every room in my house, and we had sex outdoors. you told me it was the best you'd ever had.”