“He should hate those nails. He normally considered that sort of thing tacky or gaudy, but damn if that look didn’t work on her. And because it worked on her —it was really working on him.”

“...but I’m trying to be inconspicuous.”Cinder considered telling him it wasn't working but thought better of it. The lack of a throng of screaming girls surrounding her booth was probably evidence that it was working better than she suspected. Instead of looking like a royal heartthrob, he just looked crazy.”

“The woman does not work because the man tells her to work and she obeys. On the contrary, the woman works because she has told the man to work and he hasn’t obeyed.”

“Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn’t know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn’t know he was a novelist either."(Interview in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series, ed. George Plimpton, 1988)”

“You coming?” he asked her, leaning in through the door. And then he finally really looked at me. He came to a complete halt—not just his body, but his energy. His eyebrows went right up. “Oh,” he said. I sort of flicked my hem at him, assuming what I fondly considered an enigmatic look. “This okay?” I asked. “Oh,” he said again, stepping inside the house. The screen door hit him when it closed. “Yeah. Yeah, that works.” It kind of looked like he was beginning to sweat.”

“He worked with her as she was and not as he wanted her to be.”