“Humans, herself included, held nointerest for her except as living machines, mind-bogglingly intricate, beautiful systems thatsomehow housed individuals not quite worthy of the miracle of their physical bodies.”

“I had this daft idea to come and bury the past. Except the past is not quite dead.”

“I love everything about her, including her talent for breaking my heart.”

“He was summertime itself, young, luminous, lit from within by rekindled hopes and reawakened dreams. And every beggar along his path—herself included—could expect redoubled generosity and kindness.”

“That was how he would go on tormenting her, after his physical departure from her life. A baroque plan, byzantine even, a plan that both pleased and shamed him.He awaited only the night, this one grotesque, terrible night.”

“He was a god above her, powerful, beautiful, larger than life. The light brought out the latent gold of his hair. The shadows contoured the perfect form of his body. Light and shadows converged in his eyes, bright lust, dark anger, and something else. Something else entirely. She recognized it because she’d seen it in the mirror so many times: a bleak, austere loneliness.”

“The next minute he realized what had happened to him, but not before she’d caught him staring.For a decade, I was fixated by her beauty. I wrote an entire article on the evolutionary significance of beauty as a rebuke to myself, that I, who understood the concepts so well, nevertheless could not escape the magnetic pull of one particular woman’s beauty.She knew. With surgical precision, she had peeled back his layers of defenses, until his heart lay bare before her, all its shame and yearning exposed.He could have lived with this if only he’d kept his secret whole and buried. But she knew. She knew.”