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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“She had shown Laura that David was less hers than she had ever thought and the pieces of him she did own were being taken.”

“sex was where laurel knew she knew him, and talking was the way she called him to her.”

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