“Cooking wasn’t so bad, I thought. In fact, it was a lot like sex. Sometimes it didn’t seem like such a good idea in the beginning, but then after you got into it …”

“Sometimes he wasn’t sure if he was in love with Julia or just that he wanted to be in love with her, because it would be so comforting, such a relief, to be in love with her. It seemed like such a good idea. Was there really that big of a difference?”

“I went into physics to hang around with the bright kids. I wasn’t doing anything else and I didn’t want to look dumb, so I thought I’d pretend to be a physicist, just like the others. It was five or ten years after my Ph.D. before I realized I was pretty good.”

“Sex without love is like a goddamn business transaction. And sometimes both parties feel as if they got a good deal, but that doesn't make it any less so.”

“God, if he wasn’t so handsome, strong,sometimes sweet, didn’t have a Harley, that beard, a tendency to play with my hair, didn’t look so good in jeans and wasn’t so danged good in bed, he would seriously not be worth it.”

“I like the fact that she thinks. The human face is so legible that it sometimes seems possible to watch their thoughts, the way you can see fish moving in a lake by the little ripples they make on the surface.”