“God, now she knew what decent men felt like, the disquiet before taking someone for their first time.”

“She knew what it felt like to tremble like that before touching someone -- desire so acute that it became despair.”

“she was disquietingly fluid—fluid without, however, being able to flow. I felt a hardness and a constriction in her, a grave mistrust, created already by too many men like me ever to be conquered now.”

“She felt, as she felt so often with Murphy, spattered with words that went dead as soon as they sounded; each word obliterated, before it had time to make sense, by the word that came next; so that in the end she did not know what had been said. It was like difficult music heard for the first time.”

“What she needed was someone who would take her for the whole night. Someone decent and respectable, with an apartment of his own. But how could you ever judge what men were really like? It was the young ones with the swaggering walks and the loud mouths who ended up bursting into tears and showing you pictures of their girlfriends. It was the bespectacled bankers and lawyers who liked to knock you around.”

“Pella felt like she knew a lot about men, but she couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be one of them, to be in a room of them with no woman present, to participate in their silent rights of contrition and redemption.”