“If you like Pina Coladas, and getting caught in the rain. If you're not into yoga, if you have half-a-brain. If you like making love at midnight, in the dunes of the cape. I'm the lady you've looked for, write to me, and escape.”

“You must tell me about it when you do,' she said. 'When you make love for the first time, I mean. I want to know what you think.'He glanced away from her, out of the window. An ice-cream parlour, a man with a dog, a tree. How was he going to get out of shopping next week?'It's so wonderful, it's like,' and she left her mouth open while she thought, and then it came to her, and she smiled, 'it's like colours everywhere.”

“You gave me the key of your heart, my love;Then why did you make me knock?”

“I said I splendidly loved you; it’s not true.Such long swift tides stir not a land-locked sea.On gods or fools the high risk falls–on you–The clean clear bitter-sweet that’s not for me.Love soars from earth to ecstasies unwist.Love is flung Lucifer-like from Heaven to Hell.But–there are wanderers in the middle mist,Who cry for shadows, clutch, and cannot tellWhether they love at all, or, loving, whom:An old song’s lady, a fool in fancy dress,Or phantoms, or their own face on the gloom;For love of Love, or from heart’s loneliness.Pleasure’s not theirs, nor pain. They doubt, and sigh,And do not love at all. Of these am I”

“The strong man lit a cigarette. It looked too frail for his hand. They looked like King Kong and Fay Wray, that hand, that cigarette. There was a movie going on right under his nose and he didn't even know. The guy had about one brain cell and he was doing time in it.”

“At first he didn't know where he was, whose voice it was. He must have been asleep. And waking suddenly, like that, you woke in a thousand different places that you'd never been.”

“She looked the way a rose petal looks when you crush it between finger and thumb.”