Quotes

With the coming of words, love writes and is then overwritten; love is marginalia illegibly scrawled in your own illegible hand. In time, love becomes a dense manuscript, a palimpsest of inscrutable, epic proportions, one love overlaying another, thick and hot and stinking of beds. It’s an unreadable mess.

Prison may be the hell of other people, but at least it’s not a hell of people you love.

You sit at a bar and you’re gifted with that feeling of utopia peculiar to places frequented by wanderers. Hotels are like train travel, like early-morning pillow talk with a stranger. They allow you to occupy a space that’s caught in indefiniteness.

But that narrative structure is only as true as time, which is to say it’s as much a construct as a house or a dress or a turducken.

I enjoyed having a man with whom I could visit other cities—Firenze and its salty joy of lampredotto sandwiches, sleepy Montalcino and its Brunello and pinci, Radda and its Chianti and its pici.

One by one, she showed the little metal or glass containers to me, held them under my nose, dabbed a little of each on my cheek, my eyelid, my lips. “This,” she said, “is what a woman wears instead of armor. You put on the right makeup, and you look invincible. You feel like a warrior. You will still be a woman, but you will wear this on the

knew that lust was a dangerous thing, but I wanted these men to lust

It’s not that women psychopaths don’t exist; it’s that we fake it better than

While I could not have cared less that Marco was Jewish, I was delighted to finally find his dirt. I knew Marco’s real name, his family’s business, what he was hiding, and whom he feared would find out. It was a wealth of information, and I had multiple ways I could use it. It put a spring in my step, a smile on my face, and a slick of wetness