“Every intimacy carries secreted somewhere below its initial lovely surfaces, the ever-coiled makings of complete catastrophe.”

“Big secrets were catastrophic. However hard you try to hide them, they bob to the surface and you must go over them again and again. They are taken out so often they become worn smooth as a river stone. You have to carry them around you like a baby. The secret grows until you feel like you are a skin that covers it, a thin skin, easily split, ripe”

“Just touching her makes me want to immerse myself, put my head completely under the surface of her. I want to drift, to let her carry me away, down her current.”

“Sex is not about reproduc-tion, gender is not about males and females, courtship is not aboutpersuasion, fashion is not about beauty, and love is not about affec-tion. Below the surface of every banality and cliche there lies irony,cynicism, and profundity.”

“We carry secrets under our skin like shrapnel. Our surface wounds heal, but the damage festers underneath while we worry what tiny pieces will work their way to the surface for the world to see.”

“You might think you made a new world or a new self, but your old self is always gonna be there, just below the surface, and if something happens, it'll stick its head out and say 'Hi.' You don't seem to realize that. You were made somewhere else.”