“..however she was a woman and I'd have more luck conjuring up the thoughts of a chinaman than I would figuring out what she was conspiring”

“If I'd thought she was uninterested, I never would have worried so much - the prospect of screwing something up is much more daunting than that of screwing nothing up. I definitely thought there was something there, and so there was something to lose, you see.”

“She was sitting in a garden more beautiful than even her rampaging imagination could ever have conjured up, and she was being serenaded by trees.”

“She had the scattered feeling she always got when events conspired to mess things up, and nothing exhausted and frustrated her more than a mess she was incapable of fixing.”

“All to often, however, what she [the woman] does want is the man she hopes she will make out of the man she already has.”

“I'd always disparaged the games people played in pursuit of love--or the next hook up. The whole thing was a competition to see who could get how far, and I could never figure out if there was more luck or skill involved, or some unknowable combination of the two. People rarely said what they thought, or revealed how they felt. No one was honest.”