“There was a way of looking at the world where practically every single thing that happened had some kind of double meaning.”

“...tragedy and death would follow a person whereever he went in life. There was no such thing as escape, except maybe the kind that Mr. Kirby had accomplished...”

“There is something about the act of studying an unclothed body, as an artist does, that allows a person to appreciate it as pure form, regardless of the kinds of traits traditionally regarded as imperfections. In a figure drawing class, an obese woman's folds of flesh take on a kind of beauty. You can look at a man's shrunken chest or legs or buttocks with tenderness. Age is not ugly, just poignant.”

“No doubt Richard's father, like my mother, had once held his infant son in his arms, looked into the eyes of his child's mother, and believed they would move into the future together with love. The fact that they didn't was a weight each of us carried, as every child does, probably, whose parents no longer live under the same roof. Wherever it is you make your home, there is always this other place, this other person, calling to you. Come to me. Come back.”

“It's a great thing when a man knows how to dance, she said. When a man can dance, the world is his oyster."Adele, Henry's Mother”

“Sex is a drug, Eleanor had told me. When sex enters into a situation, people lose all reason. They do things they would never do otherwise. These things they do may be crazy. May even be dangerous. May break their hearts, or someone else's... The real drug, I came to believe, was love.”

“She felt everything too deeply, it was like the world was too much for her.”