“Heart may still be the fire in hearth but I'm suddenly too cold to continue, and besides, there's no hearth here anyway and it's the end of June. Thursday. Almost noon. And all the buttons on my corduroy coat are gone. I don't know why. I'm sorry Hailey. I don't know what to do.”

“I'm stuck struggling in the cold water, and all I can do is grieve, grieve, in the hoar necessitous horror of the morning, bitterly I hate myself, bitterly it's too late yet while I feel better I still feel ephemeral and unreal and unable to straighten my thoughts or even really grieve, in fact I feel too stupid to be really bitter, in short I don't know what I'm doing and I'm being told what to do...”

“There's an old Russian saying that goes some way or another. I don't know it. I don't speak Russian. But sometimes I think about it and wonder if it's relevant to what I'm going through at the time. Probably not. I mean what do Russian know about hunger, anyway?”

“It's not as if I want him to gawk at me, but... I'm lost. I don't know what I want anyway!”

“This kiss...I'm gone. Gone. I know in that moment, that I belong to him. It's what he said: I'm his. How it happened, I don't know. I really wish I did.”

“I don't know what it is I'm doing. But it's not that. Despite all evidence to the contrary.”