“This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.”

“Oh," she said. "I wasn't going to ask, but then you never said anything about it, so I thought I'd ask.""How about you?""Not me," said Odette. She had a poem about marriage. It began, Marriage is t...”

“How quickly bodies came to love each other, promise themselves to each other always, without asking permission. From the mind! If only she could give up her mind, let her heart swell, inflamed, her...”

“She knew there were only small joys in life--the big ones were too complicated to be joys when you got all through--and once you realized that, it took a lot of the pressure off.”

“So I needed to be womanised. I was losing my sheen.”

“She wore a lot of gray-green corduroy. She had been under the impression that it brought out her eyes, those shy stars.”

“I don't have a love life. I have a like life.'Mamie smiled. She thought how nice that might be, to be peacefully free from love...”

“The soul, they say, is divine and the flesh is iniquity. But I am a musician and I ask this - without the wood and the strings of the violin, where would the sonata find form?”

“ I suppose that it is not so easy to go home and it takes a bit of time to make a son out of a stranger.”

“Everyone wanted me to be the bad boy, the label wanted it, the publicists wanted it, but I was just trying to be myself.”