“There are many similarities between Germans and blacks. The nouns themselves are loaded with so much historical baggage it's impossible for anyone to be indifferent to the simple mention of either group. We're two insightful people looking for reasons to love ourselves; and let's not forget we both love pork and wear sandals with socks.”

“We're not meant to separate sex from love; there's a reason why euphoria occurs in both situations. Sex and love nourish each other. You can argue it's humanity's way of establishing family groups and guaranteeing creation of the next generation; but the simple fact remains: the more often two people engage in sex, the more likely it is that one of them will fall in love.”

“We're all broken, Laura. And we're all looking for someone to blame. God's the easiest target. We let ourselves believe that if He loved us, things would be perfect. But we both know that's not true.”

“So we're getting close to suggesting that camp is both the opposite of cool and a refinement of it. Camp and cool both have an element of not-caring, of disdain for the ordinary. The difference is that cool implies a lack of conscious effort, whereas camp is about putting everything you've got into it. Either you love something too much (much more than it's "worth", so the stereotypical anorak-wearing Doctor Who fan and the Barry Manilow cultist are both manifestations of this, at least to the outside world), or you're given to going over the top. Or you do both at once, in many cases. Both phenomena are examples of people fashioning an identity for themselves, and if you're reading this book then you must know people like that. Cool is not caring, camp is actively defiant.”

“We had loved people we really shouldn't have loved and then married other people in order to forget our impossible loves, or we had once called out hello into the cauldron of the world and then run away before anyone could respond.”

“How do we not have money? This is a country of organizations. Everywhere you look people are organizing themselves into groups, one joining many and many morphing into one. They have money, let's have at some of it.”