“Both could feel the relationship crumbling to pieces beneath the weight of everything that Gavin refused to say.”

“He yearned not to feel... He wished he could rip out his heart, his innards, everything that was screaming inside him...”

“It was strange how your brain could know what your heart refused to accept.”

“Gavin saw a grave purely as a marker for the place where a corpse was decomposing; a nasty thought, yet people took it into their heads to visit and bring flowers, as though it might yet recover.”

“If she could have died...if she could have disappeared forever...but the solid surface of things refused to dissolve around her, and her body, her hateful hermaphrodite's body, continued in its stubborn, lumpen way, to live...”

“It was so good to be held. If only their relationship could be distilled into simple, wordless gestures of comfort. Why had humans ever learned to talk?”

“He wished he could rip out his heart, his innards, everything that was screaming inside him...”