“By that time he had pushed the bottle so long and so freely, that its fumes had taken possession of every brain to such a degree, that they held Dame Reason rather at the staff's end, overbearing all her counsels and expostulations.”

“With regard to the work itself, I dare not venture a judgment, for I do not understand it.”

“Having been bred amongst mountains I am always unhappy when in a flat country. Whenever the skirts of the horizon come on a level with myself I feel myself quite uneasy and generally have a headache.(Letter to Sir Walter Scott, 25 July 1802)”

“Will you no come back again? Better loved you’ll never be,And will you no come back again?”

“Then I pulled off her boots, desperate to enter our world of touch and skin, trailed fingers, that strange elation of lovemaking where the body of another can lift you from your own mortal flesh and put you at some height above a bed of twisted sheets and tangled limbs, with no way of knowing where one self starts and the other ends.”

“It would have been absurd of him to trace into ramifications the effect of the ribbon from which Miss Gostrey’s trinket depended, had he not for the hour, at the best, been so given over to uncontrolled perception. What was it but an uncontrolled perception that his friend’s velvet band somehow added, in her appearance, to the value of every other item – to that of her smile and of the way she carried her head, to that of her complexion, of her lips, her teeth, her eyes, her hair? What, certainly, had a man conscious of a man’s work in the world to do with red velvet bands? He would n’t for anything have so exposed himself as to tell Miss Gostrey how much he liked hers, yet he had none the less not only caught himself in the act – frivolous, no doubt, idiotic, and above all unexpected – of liking it: he had in addition taken it as a starting point for fresh backward, fresh forward, fresh lateral flights.”

“I choose you," he said very softly, "Max."Then his hard, rough hand tenderly cuppoed my chin, and suddenly his mouth was on mine, and every synapse in my brain shorted out.We had kissed a couple of times before, but this was different. This time, I squelched my immediate, overwhelming desire to run away screaming. I closed my eyes and put my arms around him despite my fear. Then somehow we slid sideways so we were lying in the cool sand. I was holding him fiercely, and he was kissing me fiercely, and it was...just so, so intensely good. Once I got past my usual, gut-wrenching terror, there was a long, sweet slide into mindlessness, when all I felt was Fang, and all I heard was his breathing, and all I could think was "Oh, God, I want to do this all the time.”