“I like the way we talk to each other. It feels honest. It was different with Manuel. One of us always had to win. Husbands and wives do that, worry more about being right than being truthful.”

“We all perform. It's what we do for each other all the time, deliberately or unintionally. It's a way of telling about ourselves in the hope of being recognized as what we'd like to be.--PERFORMANCE”

“While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.”

“It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.”

“My mother had more than once remarked that my father was one of the war's casualties, that the Sam Hall who came back wasn't the one who left, the one she'd fallen in love with. I didn't doubt that she believed this certain truth, or even that it was true, after a fashion. But it was a nice way of ignoring another simple truth--that people changed, with or without wars, and that we sometimes don't know people as well as we think we do, that the worst errors in judgment often result from imagining we understand what has escaped us entirely.”

“His thumb touched her lower lip, his eyes fixed on her. As if he couldn’t be stopped, the words flowed out of his mouth. “I want to take you in my arms, to kiss you long and hard, to touch you like you’ve never been touched, to give you the pleasure I feel running in your veins.”

“If you want to stay, I can meet you after the scrimmage. You could come to my house or I could come to yours or we could meet at the library or a coffee shop or..."Stop talking, asshole."Or we could go somewhere with Wi-Fi or somewhere outside or..."Oh my God, I hate myself right now.”