“Every exchange making him feel like an idiot, making him draw his spine up straight and making him fiddle with his hair, and all he wanted to do was to see her naked on the floor. Not brutal, not unkind, enraptured.”

“Standing in the center of the crowd, his solitude was enormous. He felt that in all the vast and frozen space in which he lived his life - every hand needy, every heart wanting something from him - everybody had a reason to be and a place to land. Everybody but him. For him there was nothing. In all the cold and bitter world, there was not a single place for him to sit down.”

“...she had brought harm to him, in the believe that nothing mattered, that no moment had consequences beyond the moment itself. She had agreed to kill him without realizing that he would die".”

“She was the beautiful, lethal,insinuating spider he had waited for all his life. She was the final knife in his heart. He opened his heart with gladness.”

“She was the beautiful, lethal, insinuating spider he had waited for all his life.”

“...desire had its exaggerated and dramatic pleasures, but he was bored by the endless scenes and recantations. Love was simply the same steady heartbeat hour after hour. It bored him with its lack of event.”

“What makes a child of four realize that something awful is going to happen? (168)”