“Then he made love to her not only as if he had never experienced lovemaking before, but no one had.”

“He thought about alone in Constantinople that time, having quarreled in Paris before he had gone out. He had whored the whole time and then, when that was over, and he had failed to kill his loneliness, but only made it worse, he had written her, the first one, the one who left him, a letter telling her how he had never been able to kill it . . . . How when he thought he saw her outside the Regence one time it made him go all faint and sick inside, and that he would follow a woman that looked like her in some way, along the Boulevard, afraid to see it was not she, afraid to lose the feeling it gave him. How every one he had slept with had only made him miss her more. How what she had done could never matter since he could never cure himself of loving her.”

“He was actually interested in things I had to say, something I'd never experienced before and made me feel extraordinarily special.”

“Then there was a silence he had never before experienced: in it, you could hear the years.”

“He recognized that he was feeling something he had never experienced before : the desire to live in one place forever. With the girl with the raven hair his days would never be the same again”

“He had never smoked but then had he ever loved? Life made him love and love made him smoke.”