“Perhaps we'd understood each other too well to be attracted to one another. There were no occlusions in communication, those breaks in understanding that awaken desire.”

“No one feels another's grief, no one understands another's joy. People imagine that they can reach one another. In reality they only pass each other by.”

“We'd been raised to survive, to meet challenges, and to chase our dreams. … And we don't only love each other, but like each other as well.”

“Those communities who adopted the new rules and, in doing so, infringed upon deeply embedded natural feelings became the successful ones, the ones who multiplied because they were more prosperous and were able to attract people from other groups.”

“We wrote the first draft in about nine weeks. Nine weeks of gloriously long phone calls, in which we would read each other what we'd written, and try to make the other one laugh. We'd plot, delightedly, and then hurry off the phone, determined to get to the next good bit before the other one could. We'd rewrite each other, footnote each other's pages, sometimes even footnote each other's footnotes.”

“A year. We'd known each other only a year, but we'd lived a lifetime in it.”

“A 'relationship' occurs when two people run out of things to say to each other, so they shut each other up by putting their genitals in each other's mouths. A break up comes about when they run out of things to do with those, too.”

“Revolutionary movements attract those who are not good enough for established institutions as well as those who are too good for them.”

“That was another lesson I had learned perhaps too well: people meant pain.”

“He’s like Gérard Depardieu, another strong, physical man who can break your heart with sensitivity. He has this creepiness, but a sympathetic attractiveness, too.”