You know someone's right for you when the things they don't to say are even more important than the things they do.

You ought to take more chances, I said. I took too many earlier, she said. I'm sorry.

You see why I married her, Mycroft? The exquisite juxtaposition of ladylike threads and backhanded compliments proved irresistible.

But I want to see Clara, Charlie's friend, who's right up my street. I want to see her because I don't know where my street is; I don't even know which part of town it's in, which city, which country,...

Everyone disliked their partners at some time or another, she knew that. But she'd spent her hours in the dark wondering whether she'd ever liked him. Would it really have been so much worse to spend...

So she stood naked in front of the young man and at this moment stopped playing the game.

Physical love is unthinkable without violence.

Other people were so unsuccessful at fending off love! Members of Congress who had affairs with their aides, or students who I'd known in college, girls who as freshmen declared themselves lesbians,...

I had the fleeting thought then that we are each of us pathetic in one way or another, and the trick is to marry a person whose patheticness you can tolerate.

A man has never told me he likes me. Like is more interesting than love.

Who doesn't have a friend who worships her lover with a passion that seems baffling to everyone that knows them? Before you met him for the first time, she'd talked him up like he was a cross between...

I wasn't even sure I wanted a man in my life again; by that time I'd exhausted the notion that the answer to a man is another man, and I was out of breath.

Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she's actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along.

You fit into melike a hook into an ey

To be honest, going out with Ed after Josh is like moving on to Duchy Originals super-tasty seeded loaf after plastic white bread. {I don't mean to be rude about Josh. And I didn't realize it at the...

Good sex requires further exposure than simply removing one's clothes. And as for a good relationship? Ah! For this one must be prepared to reveal even more. - André Chevalier

He'd wanted her. Out of all the women in the world, he'd wanted her. Wanted, hell, she thought grinning now. Pursued, demanded. Taken. And while she could admit all of that was exciting, he'd gone one...

I will be on the look out for you, my dear girl, he wrote. You must expect to give yourself up when you come. For this buttoned-up age, for Burnham, it was a letter that could have steamed itself...

dealing with any man means dealing with multiple personalities.

That's the catch about betrayal, of course: that it feels good, that there's something immensely pleasurable about moving from a complicated relationship which involves minor atrocities on both sides...

It's as if every conversation with a woman was a test, and men always failed it, because they always lacked the key to the code and so they never quite understood what the conversation was really...

This emotion I'm feeling now, this is love, right?I don't know. Is it a longing? Is it a giddy stupid happiness just because you're with me?Yes, she said.That's influenza, said Miro. Watch for nausea...

It was like we were exchanging codes, on how to be a father and a daughter, like we'd read about it in a manual, translated from another language, and were doing our best with what we could...

He smiled as he imagined the composite Jamie/Isabel, who would play the bassoon, read philosophy, interfere in other people's affairs rather too much, drive a green Swedish car and make legendary...

She had never been able to tolerate dishonesty, which she thought threatened the very heart of relationships between people. If you could not count on other people to mean what they said, or to do...

There is no formula to relationships. They have to be negotiated in loving ways, with room for both parties, what they want and what they need, what they can do and what their life is like.

Revolting' was the last word I ever spoke as someone who'd never kissed a girl.