“The flesh had infinity in it. I must know every inch by touch yet every inch renewed its mystery the instant my hand moved on. Delightful endless futility.”

“In my dreams a small wolf slept inside of me and it wasn’t comfortable. It moved it’s heels and elbows and paws, struggled to make space between my lungs, stomach, bladder. Occasionally a scrabbling claw punctured something and I woke. What were you dreaming? Arabella wanted to know. I knew what it was dreaming. It was dreaming of being born. The form and scale of its occupancy shifted. Sometimes its legs were in my legs, its head in my head, its paws in my hands. Other times it was barely the size of a kitten, heartburn hot and fidgety under my sternum. I’d wake and for a moment feel my face changed, reach up and touch the muzzle that wasn’t there.”

“Oy, Jake,” he said, shaking his head, like a benevolent rabbi I’d disappointed with my weak will. “Impatience. Seriously. I know this is hard for you …” He glazed over. Drifted a moment. Went through something in his impenetrable interior … “Actually I do know this is hard for you. I’m sorry. I’m not using my imagination. That was my New Year’s resolution, you know. Work on standing in the other fellow’s shoes. That and to read one poem every day.”

“No artist knows everything (yea, even this artist - piss-artist, con-artist, body-artist) but since every artist knows more than he can tell, all art is lying by omission.”

“There's an exclamation mark on this keyboard which shares tab-space with the number one. Shift+1=! It's insufficient. Radically inadequate as the denotation of my surprise. Even in bold. Even in underlined bold italic. I need something else, some punctuation mark not yet invented.”

“She was afraid of us moving in together. With Mark, domestic intimacy had become domestic claustrophobia; and had riddled romance (though she never quite said this) like woodworm. It wasn't that she was resistant to the glamourlessness of stray toenails and washing up and underpants and mug-rings and hoovering and boredom; on the contrary: it was that she was horrified by her own willingness to sink so deeply into the comfort of such details. A no nonsense streak in her identified the ordinary with truth, the exotic with delusion. She and Mark had delighted in dehumbugging their own romance, had (she confessed) Larkinized themselves into mundanity addicts. In Mark's case (she suspected) because he knew deep down he had no magic in him; in her own because she knew deep down that she had too much (no nonsense streak or not), and that to release it would be to lose him - and perhaps herself. Therefore they had wallowed together in cosiness, both suffering, Mark for fear of her leaving him, her for fear (certainty, actually) that the romantic inside her would rise up and smash their deadening familiarity to pieces.”

“I wish you had fucked her. Then you’d know. Then you’d know the sublime … Her asshole, for example. It’s like a stern coquettish spoiled secretary working for Himmler—”