“What she might have told him was that taxidermy, like sex, is a very personal subject; the manner in which we impose it on others should be discreet.”

“In homosexual sex you know exactly what the other person is feeling, so you are identifying with the other person completely. In heterosexual sex you have no idea what the other person is feeling.”

“I'll not have my grandson subjected to the humiliation of his reading becoming public. We have to cope with this disgrace discreetly -- Grandma Ruth”

“Food-- like sex, politics, and religion-- is an intensely personal, emotional, and complicated subject.”

“Once Paul told her that the beach was like him because it changed every day but it never made any progress. Later she remembered thinking that a normal person might have begun by saying that he was like the beach.”

“We have traditionally thought of knowing in terms of subject and object and have struggled to attain objectivity by detaching our subjectivity. It can't be done, and one of the achievements of postmodernity is to demonstrate that. What we are called to, and what in the resurrection we are equipped for, is a knowing in which we are involved as subjects but as self-giving, not as self-seeking, subjects: in other words, a knowing that is a form of love.”