“I stood there, shocked. I'd never hugged a perfect stranger before, but maybe this was how people in California did things.”

“No, he wasn't like them at all. And even though my experience with the opposite sex was pitifully non-existent, this was someone I wanted to know. Someone I needed to know. Someone I needed to have know me.”

“Of course, I'm only joking," he says, studying me. "The reason they're staring is because I am extraordinarily good looking.”

“For there to be light, there must be darkness. For there to be joy, there must be sorrow. For there to be beauty, there must be the grotesque.”

“Don't talk to strangers? Well, I figure he will always be a stranger unless I speak to him. Where is the logic in such a rule?”

“I wish he was mine," he said. The words slipped out without thought, but there was no taking them back..."I love Gus," she said, cutting him deep, deep. "Not only is he my husband, but he is honorable and noble and good, and I vowed before God that I would love him." She made a harsh tearing sound in her throat. "When I saw him that day, when he knocked me over with his bicycle, he was like something out of a dream, my dream." She looked at him, and her eyes glittered like shards of glass. "Oh, God, God, how could I have known, how could I have known? Up until that moment, you see, he was the closest thing I'd found to you.”

“Southern California is a landscape of edges and contradictions set upon by a variegated human population that at times seems hell bent to leave its destructive footprints from desert to ocean, mountain to flat coastal plain. I have discovered that the sharp divisions and false syntheses of this place reflect the inconsistencies and unexplored edges in my personality, and that as much as I might have longed to live quietly in some less densely populated place, this would never do...When I settled in Malibu I discovered the strong pull of place and began to incorporate landscape as a dominant character in my writing.”