“I stick my finger into existence and it smells of nothing.”

“I have the most perfect belly button. When I stick my fingers in it, I feel a nerve in the center of my body shoot up my spine.”

“The alcohol smell is on my fingers, cold and remote, piercing like a steel pin going in. It smells like white enamel basins. When I look up at the stars in the nighttime, cold and white and sharp, I think they must smell like that.”

“He was in my hair, my eyes, my fingers, my heart. I day-dreamed about what he was doing, thinking, seeing, smelling, feeling. I could not eat for thoughts of him.”

“So this was where she lived! I smelled it, touched it with my fingers, walked through it with my feet. It was as I had imagined. This was her home. Blindfolded I could have acknowledged the place, for her odor possessed it, her fevered, lost existence proclaimed it as part of a hopeless scheme. An apartment on Temple Street, and apartment in Los Angeles.”

“I jammed my hand in my jacket pocket, bracing myself for the next hit, and feel something. Something grainy and small, sticking to the tips of my fingers: the sand from Commons Park.”

“Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.”

“You have not been sticking your dirty fingers in my sauce,’’ Eve said, and pointed her wooden spoon
at him.
He quickly took the finger out of his mouth. ‘‘First off, they’re not dirty. I licked them first.”

“The smell of subjectivity clings to the mechanical definition of complexity as stubbornly as it sticks to the definition of information.”

“Mark my words, nothing smells worse than burned scorpion.”