Sublime

I tried to remember how Pinocchio had become a real boy. It had something to do with being in a whale, maybe saving his father’s life; I hadn’t done anything like that. But surely a woman was more complex than a puppet boy and she might become herself not once-and-for-all but cyclically: waxing, waning, sometimes disappearing altogether.

If I indulged my desire to eat ice cream for breakfast every morning, I would no longer have the pleasure of fitting into my jeans. In this case, I wanted Neal to feel secure more than I wanted to sit at a café with that man wondering if he would hold my hand.

a girl—and then a woman—ruled by hungers large and small.

She felt pleasure in orderly things—a perfectly efficient section of code,

cicerone