“I understood that as much as I had resisted the outside, as much as I had constricted my life, as much as I had closed and narrowed the channels into me, there were still many takers for the quiet ...”

“Be so good they can't ignore you.”

“A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.”

“Some people have a way with words, and other people...oh, uh, not have way.”

“I like a woman with a head on her shoulders. I hate necks.”

“Boy, those French! They have a different word for everything.”

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”

“I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.”

“If your workplace was somehow transplanted into the jungle and everyone was forced to survive at a very primitive level, it's safe to say that eventually your boss would rape you.”

“Prostitution has the same relationship to trafficking as sex has to rape. One is voluntary, the other is not”

“The man at the end of the bar was looking at me. ... Should I get drunk and sleep with him now? But I could see that I would regret that so much I would want to die after. I didn't want to get invo...”

“She didn't look like any motel manager I had ever seen. More likely an actress who hadn't quite made the grade down south, or a very successful amateur tart on the verge of turning pro. Whatever he...”

“Sex can be used either for self-affirmation or for self-transcendence either to intensify the ego and consolidate the social persona by some kind of conspicuous embarkation and heroic conquest, or...”

“He didn't know all that much about how the machinery worked anyway. Such knowledge was for specialists. In war, as in love, he was a fearless, happy-go-lucky adventurer.”

“If she did experience sex--or something close to it--in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity.”