“Betsy hadn't had sex, actual; sex-sex, full sex, in two hundred and fifty-three days. She decided on her thirty-seventh birthday that she wouldn't sleep with anyone unless it was in the context of a committed relationship which had some sort of future, and she was only gradually coming to the realization of what happens when a woman her age makes a decision like that: she never has sex again.”

“She knew that what she was going through was nothing special, just garden-variety heartbreak, the sort of thing that poets and novelists had been writing about for hundreds of years, but she also knew, from those same books, that there were people who never recover form it, ones who go on through life beset by a dim and painful longing.”

“You don't just decide to have sex because you feel like having sex. You decide to have sex once you realize you're in love with someone and want to express that love physically.”

“Why had she set limits like no sex? I want sex.”

“I'm not ancient, darling. I'm only fifty. And when it comes to sex a woman of fifty can often outlast a man half her age.”

“You’ve found that there is something that can make you feel, and make you feel present: sex. Not the routine, dusk-and-dawn sex of a trusted, established relationship, but illicit, dangerous sex. Sex that is novel and leaves you sore; that is experienced in the gaps between your mundane, moral life; that is strange and breathless and addictive.”

“She had not made a decision to give up sex, only the clamor of romance, because it was exhausting her, doing her no good and too much harm...”