It's just the most amazing thing to love a dog, isn't it? It makes our relationships with people seem as boring as a bowl of oatmeal.

Donner PartyForsaken, fucking in the cold,eating each other, lostrunny noses,complaining all the timelike so man

She would be quiet at first. Then she would say a word about something small, something she had noticed, and then another word, and another, each one flung out like a little piece of sand, one from...

When a girl uses six derogatory adjectives in her attempt to paint the portrait of the loved one, it means something. One may indicate a merely temporary tiff. Six is big stuff.

I pray you indulge me for a space, for I am going to set out on a speech which may have some duration, but whose theme may be gleaned from its opening phrase: how dare you.

Has it ever occurred to you that Max feels the same basic contempt for you as you do for him?""He feels contempt for me?""It is something he feels very readily.""No, I hadn't thought that.""Well, the...

There was a warmth of fury in his last phrases. He meant she loved him more than he her. Perhaps he could not love her. Perhaps she had not in herself that which he wanted. It was the deepest motive...

That's what I've noticed about being 32: it is a lot of women and a lot of boys our age.

Somehow, later, exhausted and dismayed by these sapping, abrasive, attriting episodes, they came to a sort of truce; but it was at the expense of any closeness.

It was completely fifth garde and completely silly and I loved it, because he wasn't afraid to be silly. It was like kissing him first - I could do whatever I wanted and not have to worry what he'd...

Because nothing between human beings is uncomplicated and there's no way to speak of human beings without simplifying and misrepresenting them.

The thing that binds us together is that we have both lowered our expectations of life

The thing about her is, she's good-natured. He knew it the second he saw her standing by the parking meters. He could just tell from the soft way her belly looked. With women, you keep bumping against...

Why is it," he said, one time, at the subway entrance, "I feel I've known you so many years?""Because I like you," she said, "and I don't want anything from you.

However, one certainty floated in the air: that night, at the end of a conversation that should have brought them closer, something had been broken between them, definitively and forever. He did not...

Women know more about words than men ever will. And they know how little they can ever possibly mean.

Someone real," I hear myself saying. "Someone who never has to pretend, and who I never have to pretend around. Someone who's smart, but knows how to laugh at himself. Someone who would listen to a...

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.