“I have never seen a place like Paris for varieties of sexual provender. as soon as a woman loses a front tooth or an eye or a leg she goes on the lose. In America she'd starve to death if she had nothing to recommend her but a mutilation. Here it is different. A missing tooth or a nose eaten away or a fallen womb, any misfortune that aggravates the natural homeliness of the female, seems to be regarded as an added spice, a stimulant for the jaded appetites of the male.”

“A week in the hospital she had told us. A hysterectomy, she had said. It had seemed unremarkable to me in a woman of forty-six long finished with childbearing, although every day that I grow older I realize there is never anything unremarkable about losing any part of what makes you female - a breast, a womb, a child, a man.”

“But the most important thing of all, to which she kept returning like a tongue probing a sore tooth, was the realization that she had fallen in love with her gaurdian.”

“She'd never imagined it like this-when she thought of someone (a woman like herself)losing her mind, she'd imagined shrieks and wails, hallucinations; but at that moment it had seemed clear that there was another way, far quieter; a way that was numb and hopeless, flat, so much so that an emotion as strong as sorrow would have been a relief.”

“A dancer on break approached him. She smiled. Each tooth was angled in a different direction, as if her mouth were the masterwork of a mad orthodontist. "Hi," she said. "Hi." "You're really cute." "I don't have any money."She spun and walked away. Ah, romance.”

“They could flee to Paris. To America. He had the money; she'd want for nothing. He'd take the mother, if she insisted. The mother, the maid, her pet spaniel, if she had one. He'd go anywhere, dare anything, to have her. And he knew nothing about her.Was love insanity, or insanity love?”