“Gravity, interpreted as an innate attraction between every pair of particles of matter, was an occult quality in the same sense as the scholastics' "tendency to fall" had been”

“In the world “out there,” there are no verbs, no speech events, and no adjacency pairs. There are particles of matter moving around in certain recurrent and yet not fully predictable patterns. We interpret such experiences as and through symbolic means, including linguistic expressions. That’s what it means to be human.”

“Archer had always been inclined to think that chance and circumstance played a small part in shaping people's lots compared with their innate tendency to have things happen to them.”

“Some doctors say a person who has only had same-sex attractions is, like, a zero. A person who has only had opposite-sex attractions is, like, a ten. He says most people fall between one and nine.”

“My attraction had been immediate and profound. And it had nothing to do with the way he looked. My attraction was to what resided between his lines.”

“It doesn’t matter how old you are, what level of schooling you’ve had or where you live—stalking is innate to the female psyche. We’ve all been there.”