“His presence makes me feel thin. Not model slender. But worn, like an old cotton housedress. Thin like a specimen pressed between two plates of glass. Like a bug squashed beneath the marching boot of a soldier.Thin and worn and silence like I've never known.This is how I know he is not a Tick.They are as pitiable as they are inhuman. They are fear personified. Their emotions and minds given over to rage and hunger. They are all noise. He is none.If he is not a Tick, does that make him a Tock?”

“Perhaps, over the years, like most things, the walls had aged. Thinned. Worn thin by the day to day endlessness of its own existence.”

“It’s more like he was an ant in the land of elephants. Nobody would notice his presence, no matter how much noise he might make.”

“He could feel his father’s history like ruts worn deep in the road.”

“How do I describe the feeling that envelopes my being when he is near? It is like a cocoon of warmth and peace, but beneath that there is a deep longing, a hunger that one kiss would not be able to satisfy, one kiss would only make the hunger greater. But oh, how I long for that kiss, a kiss that might never come. Being close to him does things to me, makes me feel things I never knew existed, makes me want things I have never wanted before. I have never desired to know a man's body before I met Ariston. I wonder if he knows that I desire him in such a way, that I not only want to know his body, but that I want him to know mine. There is a part of me that would not care if he loves me or not if I could just have one beautiful, passionate night with him, while the rest of me knows that one night would never be enough.”

“i know he was not angry with me- he could not be angry with me- and yet his silence felt like anger to me, as cold and raging as fury.”