“It was all so strange, so unlike what he had been looking forward to.”

“So he explored, explored within himself, scanning himself with a lamp, as if it were not himself at all but some strange monster that he had been commanded to guard.”

“Shit, he was nervous as he looked at her lips. Which was so strange. He'd had so much sex over the course of his life, all different kinds of combinations, but the prospect of kissing her properly wiped all of that away: He was the virgin he'd never been, clueless and weak-kneed." Vishous in Lover Unbound, page 278”

“She was utterly unlike what she had been when he first saw her. Both morally and physically she had changed for the worse. [...] He looked at her as a man looks at a faded flower he has gathered, with difficulty recognizing in it the beauty for which he picked and ruined it.”

“...he looked so strange and absentminded; quite obviously he had just been reading a book, one could tell that from the expression in his eyes, from his hair, from the abstracted way in which he managed his hands.”

“It's so strange: grown-ups trying to become young, young ones trying to grow up and all the time, whatever people want, time moves forward, forward.”