“And that phrase - 'sleeping like a baby.' Some blonde said it blithely on the subway the other day. I wanted to lie down next to her and scream for five hours in her ear.”

“I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.”

“He bent to put his cheek against hers. His breath against her ear made her shudder with each deliberately spoken word. "I have wanted to do this," he said, "every moment of every hour of every day that I have been with you since the day I met you.”

“A shell screams over the house. He thinks: I only want to sit here with her for a thousand hours.”

“Amy," Elsie Moore said in her crackling voice, her gaze fixed on Declan. "I want you to get me a new bear. A blond one.”

“I didn't ask any questions. Everything I wanted to know was written in tortured phrases across the desolation of her face. It didn't look like insanity to me. It looked like fear, the terrible fear screaming from her big hungered eyes, alert now from the drug.”

“I sat down next to her. Took her hand. This can work, I said. All we have to do is try.”

“I met Courtney Love and she said she'd like to sleep with me, but she couldn't cos of my "pop-star thing"… so I said to her I couldn't sleep with her either - cos of her 'ugly thing'…”

“It's been a long day. I can't wait until the next day. I can't wait to sleep. I had two hours of sleep last night.”

“Matthew wanted hours, days, weeks alone with her… he wanted all her thoughts and smiles and secrets. The freedom to lay his soul bare before her.”