Books

"It didn’t look like a key. It was just a little bent piece of metal and though I tried it on my own wrist a few times and it worked, the thought of being handcuffed to the bedposts in this yellow house scared me, even if the people who owned it edited radical books."

"You will find this, perhaps, an over-intellectualization of the event. Indeed, but this was what I was trained to do. This, and pliés."

I looked at her and I could see she was reading me, seeing how the conversation with Jim had gone, getting everything she needed to know—the words were just her playing for time. Since meeting Tyler I’d believed that a psychic connection between human beings was possible. ‘Kinship’ is the best word in English for it. The French call it une affinité profonde, which I also like it but it still doesn’t quite get there. It’s that doppelgänger effect that can go either way: to mutual understanding or mutual destruction.

"If there’s one quality I hate in a woman, it’s modesty. Besides making me, with my trombone mouth, feel vaguely uncouth, I think it’s a chickenshit response to the demands of the marketplace, or the universe, not that I can tell them apart."

Sally had become a platinum blonde, which made her look like Kim Novak with a brain, and her career, as she referred to her life, looked like it might do something. She actually could act.