“I was looking for my ex-lover to break the Sixth Commandment.”

“I step straight toward the female librarian. She looks soft, as if she's been raised in a box and purely milk-fed, like veal.”

“A pretty woman is a Christmas tree,' my mother told me in the airport. This fella is hanging things on my branches as his gaze sweeps from my face all the way down my body to my hips and then back to my face. Ideas fly from his widened eyes and land on me like teeny, decorative burdens. He is giving me shyness, maybe, some book smarts, and a certain yielding sweetness in bed. The oil-slick eyes get me, and I find myself hanging a few ornaments myself, giving him deft hands and a sense of humor.”

“That was normal. That was regular and real.. It didn't look like a place [she] could get to from here.”

“I'd thought Clarice's smile was both too dim and friendly and too wide and white, so that she looked to me like the love child of a cannibal and a Labrador retriever.”

“I would take today's joy, and tomorrow's. I would take it with both hands, anywhere it came.”

“I wanted her note to say that I was a red hole dug out of the guts of her, a seeping wound that hadn’t healed a lick in the twenty-odd years since she had left me.”