“her body feels different, no longer taut and sinewy but sponge-like fluid. Saturated. It has a different energy, a deep orangy-like pink, like the inside of a hibiscus.”

“The difference between lie and lay. Lay is always passive. Even men used to say, I'd like to get laid. Though sometimes they said, I'd like to lay her. All this is pure speculation. I don't really know what men used to say. I had only their words for it.”

“Like a White Russian drinking tea in Paris, marooned in the twentieth century, I wander back, try to regain hose distant pathways; I become too maudlin, lose myself. Weep...I sit in the chair and ooze like a sponge.”

“When I am lonely for boys it’s their bodies I miss. I study their hands lifting the cigarettes in the darkness of the movie theaters, the slope of a shoulder, the angle of a hip. Looking at them sideways, I examine them in different lights. My love for them is visual: that is the part of them I would like to possess. Don’t move, I think. Stay like that, let me have that.”

“Here and there are worms, evidence of the fertility of the soil, caught by the sun, half dead; flexible and pink, like lips.”

“Gone mad is what they say, and sometimes Run mad, as if mad is a different direction, like west; as if mad is a different house you could step into, or a separate country entirely. But when you go mad you don't go any other place, you stay where you are. And somebody else comes in.”

“he might die for her, but living for her would be quite different.”