"I find a woman with brains enormously attractive and not threatening in the least. A pretty face is nice, too, but having somebody to converse with and share thoughts for thirty or forty years is very..."
- Beatriz Williams
"This was what she couldn't get enough of, not if she lived forever: Harry on her skin, Harry's grateful kisses on her neck, Harry and Olive, teeming and sated, brimming over with each other, as if thi..."
"Is this different? Does love make lovemaking better? Does Nick feel this holy consummation, this wonder and beauty, this eternity, the way I do? Or is sex simply like this, designed by Nature to fool ..."
"...you're dazzling. I'm dazzled, I'm upside down and inside out and...God, Vivian. I don't know what to say. There aren't words. I just want to crawl back under the blanket and spend my life doing tha..."
"Besides, it seems to me, since my pleasure is more or less a foregone conclusion, the main object of the exercise ought to be your pleasure. A rather elusive creature, I've heard. Fascinating sort of ..."
"(He remembered resting against her afterward, listening to the beat of her heart, taking her breath into his lungs, and thinking that he was the luckiest man in the world, that you couldn't connect wi..."
"Well, that's the thing about choices, isn't it? There are always more to make. I've never seen a street where you couldn't cross to the other side."
"Because you learn things when you talk to people, especially people who aren't like you. You learn what a goddamned polyglot race we are, we marvelous human beings. Some people are friendly. Some peop..."
"Her father had admired her mother without ever truly understanding her. And her mother--her mother had relied on her father without appreciating him. There had been a gulf between them that couldn't b..."
"One can follow the sun, of course, but I have always thought that it is best to know some winter, too, so that the summer, when it arrives, is the more gratefully received."