“I focused, rather embarrassingly, on his chest which was rising and falling slowly. I left teeth marks!”

“I'd rather be a rising ape than a falling angel.”

“After modernism, things changed. Indeed, modernism sometimes seems to me like an equivalent of the Fall. Remember, the first thing Adam and Eve did when they ate the fruit was to discover that they had no clothes on. They were embarrassed. Embarrassment was the first consequence of the Fall. And embarrassment was the first literary consequence of this modernist discovery of the surface. "Am I telling a story? Oh my God, this is terrible. I must stop telling a story and focus on the minute gradations of consciousness as they filter through somebody's...”

“The difficulty with Poe is not figuring out which of his stories rise to the level required of this collection, but rather which of his stories to exclude from it.”

“You taste so fucking amazing.” He brought his head up and Laurel could see the violent rise and fall of his chest. “Sit on my face,” he said.”

“He knelt and slowly ran his hand down my arm, his lids heavy and his lips parted. “Aura . . . where can I touch you?”“Anywhere.”His hand left my arm and drifted to the rise of my hip bone. “And where can I kiss you?”I took a deep breath, long past ready for the future. “Everywhere.”