“I'd heard about people falling in love, and I'd heard about lust. What I had never heard about was this all-consuming need to be inside another human being. I felt this desperate compulsion to become one with him. This was desire. This was to crave. This was what if felt like to want.”

“People would never fall in love if they hadn't heard love talked about.”

“People felt themselves watching him even before they knew that there was anything different about him. His eyes made a person think that he heard things that no one else had ever heard, that he knew things no one had ever guessed before. He did not seem quite human.”

“I'd never heard of a holy man named after a llama. I'd never heard of a great, gaping vagina. And I didn't know a thing about the black boomerang of karma. all I knew for sure was this: I had been plunked into a strange, perfumed world that, as far as I could tell, seemed to be run entirely by women.”

“I'd heard about the traffic accidnet on the radio after I'd dropped Abbot off at school. I heard about the accident, that there were mutiple fatalities, an oil tanker ablaze, and the backed-up traffic on the interstate, and I had one simple though : I would take an alternate route. That was it, I would take an alternate route. Worse, I felt lucky - not because I was alive and others were dead but because I'd caught the update in time to avoid the exit ramp that would have landed me in he thick of it.”

“But when I heard his voice, I felt content. When I was with him, I felt beautiful and happy. And there was nothing I could do about it.”