Quotes from Bride Stripped Bare
Many many quotes I feel I can either relate to or have experienced myself : I refuse to say which quotes are which. Don't worry Nick, I'll lend you the book next time I see you :p
"As Cole is on top of you on this wide hotel bed you're looking at the numbers of the clock radio by the bed flicking over their numbers and you're thinking of Marilyn Monroe who said I don't think I do it properly -- you read it in a newspaper once with astonishment and relief : so, someone else, and what a someone else. . .The numbers on the clock radio are taking too long to flip over as you lie on the bed, with Cole on top of you. Something has slid away, deep in you." - p.17
"You're more than happy to write the word cock; saying it aloud, however, is another matter. It even feels a little odd to say vagina but you're not sure what else to use. You hate pussy, you don't know any woman who says it, and as for cunt, you always think it's used by men who don't like women very much. You want some words that women have colonised for themselves; maybe they exist but you haven't heard them yet. You can't say down there for the rest of your life." - p.23
"I can't tell you how many clients get absolutely no pleasure whatsoever out of bog-standard penetration, she said,. . .We just don't know how to please ourselves enough. We'll never learn. We're still too intent on the man's pleasure at the expense of our own." - p.31
"But here, now, something dormant within you is stretching awake, is arching its back. For just a fleeting moment you imagine yourself naked with your legs wide and several anonymous, assessing men and their hands running over you. You imagine being filmed, being bought. You smile at Cole. What are you thinking, he asks. Nothing, you murmur." - p.36
"All women must want children eventually, you're sure, that furious need is deep in their bones, you don't quite believe any woman who says she doesn't." - p.38
"Going down on him. This, only this, is guaranteed to make him come. Sometimes you go down on him just to get it all over with quickly. Cole pushes your head on to him as far as he can and then a little further, and when you bob up for air he measures with his thumb and finger how far you've gone and duly you marvel, the good wife, and bob down again. You often gag, or have to break the rhythm to come up for air, your jaw always aches, it goes on too long. You hate the taste of sperm, you recoil from it, like a tongue on cold metal in winter." - p.44
(After recalling a lot of old happy memories from the beginning of her relationship) "But those moments, now, seem like scenes from a movie; not quite real. The woman in them is removed, someone else. This is real, now : you've shut down, there are other things you'd rather do. It's such a bother removing all your clothes and finding time to do it and making sure you smell sweet and clean. It never seems the best time, for both of you at once, there's always something that's not quite right. Either you're not in the mood or Cole isn't and it's become easy to make an excuse." - p.45
"It's not so much the thought of them physically together, it's the intimacy in his voice. It wasn't until you overheard it in the hotel room that you realised how long it'd been since you had heard it. And you missed it, violently so. Your voice." - p.77
"It's her actions you can't understand, not Cole's. You always assumed she was the one person you'd have your whole life, not, perhaps, your mother ot your husband. She's a woman, she knows the rules. Men do not. . . You can't bear to think of them together. You have no idea how Theo is with a man. How she operates, if she turns into someone else; if she changes her manner and voice." - p.79
"Cole needs you for a party. . .You know the kind of wife Cole wants for this. He's told you before you're good arm candy: everyone likes you, thinks your sweet, lovely, wants to chat with you, but it means the supreme achievement is that everyone is admiring of Cole, for he's showing off a possession, like a car or a gold watch or a suit, and you're flavouring people's impressions that he's a success. . .You always give in, have done it your whole life; where does it come from, this stubborn need to be liked?" - p.81-82
"You don't have, anymore, a sanctuary in kindness and good deeds and surrender; you're changing, you can feel the souring. A thrill plumes through you when couples split, a feeling that order's restored, that it's the way we're all meant to be, alone." - p.88
"But something is beginning to unfold within you. An idea: to live less tentatively, more selfishly. You're intrigued by people who seem foolish and passionate and ridiculous, but alive with all the mess that entails. You've always been too cautious. . . You wonder about mining a more dangerous seam of yourself. You'd like to try harder to be beautiful, or at least interesting." - p.89
"An emptiness rules at its core, a rottenness, a silence when one of you retires to bed without saying goodnight, when you eat together without conversation, when the phone's passed wordlessly to the other. An emptiness when every night you lie in the double bed, restlessly awake, astounded at how closely hate can nudge against love, can wind around it sinuously like a cat. An emptiness when you realise that the loneliest you've ever been is within a marriage, as a wife." - p.92
"You notice the nape of his neck: how odd to be attracted to someone just by a glance at their neck." - p.93
"You imagine this Gabriel Bonilla naked, your palm on his chest, reading the span of it and the beating heart, and you cross your legs and squeeze your thighs and smile like a ten-year-old who's just been caught with the last of her grandmother's chocolates." - p.99
"You tell yourself you will never spoil it all by sleeping with him, will never have the connection stained by that. You don't want sudden awkwardness, don't want sour sleeper's breath in the morning or unflushed toilets and smoker's breath or farts. It took you a year to fart when Cole was in an adjoining room, two to fart in the same room." - p.100
"He asked you to think of the most sensuous thing you could imagine and yell it out, and there was uncomfortable laughter and then silence. Skin to skin, said your former student suddenly. Someone else, foie gras. The softness of a baby's thighs. Swimming, naked, at midnight. The smell of freshly cut grass. Faure's 'Sanctus'. A girlfriend's laugh. Until there was only you left. Kissing the back of your husband's neck, you said, while he was absorbed in his work." - p.110
"You cannot sleep, cannot sleep, and then it's dawn. Love is attention and you're not getting any: you're like a balloon that's jerked free from the fist holding it down and is now climbing and swerving in a choppy sky.
You think of other things, in bed, alone. They're with you most nights, to lull you to sleep. A group of men waching you being penetrated by a broom handle. You don't know any of the perpetrators very well. It's never intimate or tender. It's filmed. Sometimes women will be watching the penetration; by candlesticks, by animals, sometimes to women will be participating. And the men. Hands will be running over your naked body, parting your legs, probing, slipping inside. Almost every night you imagine these things to drop you into sleep. . . Now, alone, you're bound by caution. Have you ever acted, as an adult, exactly as you wished?" - p.111-112
"But you have no number, no address. And he doesn't have yours. He is gone.
You feel drained. It took so much effort to get to this point, to overcome the nausea and nerves, to resolve to pick up the phone. You didn't realise how much you were counting on the possibility of him, a new something to fill your life, until he was lost." - p.115
"He told you afterwards as he rubbed your flat belly that he could never sleep with a woman over thirty, he didn't like them enough: the sagging skin on their necks, the lines on their faces, the bodies thickening out. But you another reason, now, because by then women have lost their docility, they have awareness, the know too much." - p.119-120
"Whenever you did make love it was your thoughts that stirred you more than the touch of the man. He never knew that he wasn't at the centre of your focus while he was on you, that he was merely kick-starting the film in your head. As he pushed inside you'd slip into concentrating on a scenario that would trigger your pleasure. It all had little to do with the person making love to you. You never found the sex sexy; maybe it would come with the next man or the next but it never combusted for you." - p.120
"What you want:
The lights turned off. A touch that's gentle, slow, provocative, that builds you up, that makes you want it too much. An orgasm. . .Eye contact. . .Holding afterwards, skin to skin. Oral sex, precisely where you ask, for as long and as soft and as slow as you'd like. Sex that's uncomplicated, with no ties, where the man will do exactly what you want. Claiming happiness for yourself : you're so used to focusing on your partner's pleasure at the expense of your own.
What you do not want:
To suck a penis. The smell of stale smoke. . .A thrusting so hard it burns, it hurts. . .To be asked what are you thinking. For it to be pushed upon ou when you're tired, grubby, not yet wet. . .A rush to get in. A penis that's too big. Loud snorting at climax, or groaning, or any expression like 'ooh yes, baby' and 'cmon'. For the roll-over after the coming to be too abrupt. To be kicked out too quick.
What you love:
The arch of the foot, its bones, rake-splayed. Wide, blunt, clean fingernails. Michelangelo wrists. Cleanliness. The nape of your neck nuzzled. Your eyelids kissed. Burrowing deep under the blankets. Clothes to be drawn off slowly, in exquisite anticipation. Cold, smooth walls you are rammed against. The sound of a lover's breath close to your ear. Your hair pulled back when he's inside. Your name spoken aloud just before he comes. Connecting, a holiness fluttering within you both. Seduction that's slow, intriguing, unique, by flattery, extravagant gestures, text: poem scraps on napkins, filthy emails that should never be sent, love letters scrawled on underground passes, a line composed in lipstick on your back as you sleep, written backwards, to be read in the mirror; oh yes, all that." - p.121-122
"The Library gives you a feeling of industriousness, props your life. You dress as if going to work." - p.128
"He's making you feel so alive, just being around him. You've always loved people like that: heart lifters, not heart sinkers. He's making you laugh again, with your eyes. You talk as if this is the last time you'll ever talk and there's so little time and you need to know everything, now, before it's too late." - p.139
"He's making you feel beautiful. Wanted. Confident. Unique. Cole never sees you as any of that, he loves to tell you how you are, what you're life; to box you up tight." - p.140
"You're loving the silkiness of distraction, of flirting with possibility and relaxing into play." - p.149
"Your nails are painted for the first time in years and you keep on forgetting and catch in the corner of your eye the octopus fingers, it's as if they're weighed down with a life of their own. You write neater with them and eat neater and less." - p.152
"You're readying your life, but for what? You don't know where all the flirting and phone calls will end up. Does Gabriel feel the same as you? You don't dare to think ahead too much, for you don't want this melted under the heat of your attention, don't want it gone from your life." - p.153
"Cunt. You've always hated that word and yet suddenly it arouses you; you smile, secretly, dirtily, when you say it in your head." - p.155
"You feel an intoxicating freedom when Cole is not withyou, and yet you don't want him gone. You think of the two types of aloneness you've known recently: this wonderful, sparkly, soul-refreshing type, and the despairing loneliness that sucks the breath from your life." - p.159
"How they've seduced:
Slow, enquiring fingers on your skin in an Edinburgh flat and you took off your pyjamas as something flooded through you and you could not dam it.
Marijuana, once, but you fell asleep.
Alcohol. Champagne always worked best.
Porn. A video to soften you up and you were intrigued at first but the monotony quickly repelled and it was the coldest, most unimaginative fuck you'd ever had.
The urgency in a kiss.
An expensive hotel room that made you feel guilty.
. . .
Letters. Letters have always worked.
But how would you seduce? How would you guard against scaring a man off?
They seem, often, so flighty, difficult, contrary, easily spooked. And you're not convinced it's the men always chasing for in most of your experiences and your girlfriends' it's always the woman biting the bullet and doing the asking out, the hunting down. The looking, not the finding." - p.163-164
"You know nothing of him. You've never even been to his flat. There's so much you've never asked. Deliberately, because you don't want to hear about a girlfriend in the wings, or a wife. It's better if you don't know, so that the spell is never broken; you're not ready for that." - p.166
"A gift box is delivered. It's beautifully wrapped.
A vibrator.
You gasp. There's no note. It's obscene, fascinating, ridiculous. . .It's small enough to keep in your handbag and your fingers brush it often, imagining exotic trips and Customs officers searching your luggage, having to explain it, stammering. You've never been searched, you've always been too innocent-looking and respectable for that." - p.170
"He's wended his way into every corner of your life, he's a plasterer's fine residue, dust under a bed, a white film on a shower screen that keeps coming back and back no matter how furiously you wipe. You will him to surprise you, knowing in your heart he won't." - p.178
"Why won't he call, to put your mind at rest? Did he never want to fuck you? Did he just want a friendship, do heterosexual males ever just want that? Was he stricken with embarassment? Did he find himself falling for you and think it could never work?. . .The questions, the questions and the wind bloes through all your nights, rattling the panes and whining to be let in." - p.179
"Is it love, obsession, infatuation? You don't know. You think of a strange and beautiful word you read about once, Limerance, a psychological term, meaning an obsessive love, a state that's almost like a drug. Need like a wolf paces the perimeter of your world, back and forth, back and forth, never letting up." - p.182
"It's remarkable how similar most of the men's techniques were and yet how distinct each one is in your memory even if the name is not. You remember the unpleasant experiences more vividly than the pleasant ones; you remember why they didn't work. And your let-down. That it wasn't better than what you'd hoped, at the start, as your clothes were coming off. You always masked it." - p.187
"Why are women so constrained about pleasing themselves, why are they so focused on everyone else's pleasure at the expense of their own? What happens if they try to live selfishly?" - p.188-189
"Your pleasure is giving him pleasure, it arouses him and he asks nothing physically of you in return: no one has taught him to do that, to expect. He's your first lover who's utterly selfless, there's no request to go down on him, it's purely unselfish, feminine sex." - p.210
"You're a good wife, a good actress: it's surprisingly easy, the cover-up. . .But where does desire go? Will this fugitive feeling eventually die out? Or now that it's loosened will it lurk within you into old age. all rangy and discontented, just waiting to trip up your life?" - p.214
"Gabriel has fallen in love and you almost despise him for it; it's all messy before you, he's a man wild with uncertainty and want. He's broken the rules; insisting on exclusivity and demanding rights. You're not sure, suddenly, what it was that bound you to him. Infatuation, perhaps. The craving for a man to be tender with, to touch. The challenge, the thrill of the chase. Revenge." - p.228-229
"You imagine Gabriel waiting for the call that will not come. You've waited so many times in the past; a hostage to a lover's silence and you know too well the heart-slam of what it's like. You're tinkering so thoughtlessly with his life and not cleaning up the mess. You've created a woman's dream lover who knows something of the secrets of what women really want, and what they don't. But what do women really want?
You're not sure, now.
A cherishing? Money? Security?
They don't, necessarily, want to fall in love." - p.236
"Nothing works, it's utterly unerotic, it hurts. The woman stands back, watches, plays with a button on her shirt. You feel your body shutting down, bit by bit, like an office block's lights being switched off at night. You push the men off and tell them to leave. . .You cannot look them in the face; you stumble to the bathroom, the taste of metal in your mouth. You lock yourself in and sit on the toilet, shaking, and then suddenly retch into the toilet bowl, retch and retch, as if you are trying to heave your insides out." - p.238-239
"How many times had you said I love you in your twenties to men who didn't answer? That's beautiful, one said, beautiful, as if he was collecting the phrase in a scrapbook, pinning it to a display board like so many butterflies. How many times has something died within you as the words slipped from your mouth? And now you're on the other side, doing it back." - p.246
"But what is this urge within you, this madness kicking out as strong as a horse in a box? You sit on the edge of the couch, your fingers worry the cushion's edge, you bite your lip. You do not understand this want to do it all again, right now, to run from the room's quiet and find more and more anonymous fucks. This urge within you that is brutal, terrible, masculine, beautiful, base, that cannot be stamped out, that is all, bewilderingly, back." - p.249
"You read an article by Germaine Greer, that with motherhood women willingly endure a catastrophic decline in their quality of life. You read a scrap from Sylvia Plath's journal, that she would feel more of a prisoner as an older, tense, cynical career girl than as a richly creative wife and mother who's always growing intellectually. Did she believe this? Do you?" - p.258-259
"You're not sure why you're here but it feels magnificent to be doing something so foolish and impetuous and reckless and rash, to stop all the censoring of yourself." - p.318
"Suddenly it seems so unthinking and reckless to act on impulse to have him back; and just once. Men lure ex-lovers all the time - why, now in the thick of it, are you suddenly so uncomfortable?" - p.324
"And then, very softly, he chuckles: well then, I think I might try a Chinese girl next.
It's stunning; that moment. . .So, a Chinese girl next, like a different chocolate from the chocolate box, perhaps? You shut your eyes: don't say that, please, you think, please don't be like any other man." - p.333
"In that moment, a whole other possibility has been opened up. That he'd planned it all along." - p.334
"But then anger comes.
At all the times in the past you've said I love you and felt stripped. All the times they never rang back. All the love affairs that evaporated, bleakly, into one-night stands. All the times they've drowned you out. Drained your energy. You confidance. Stood you up. Walked out. Wanted a Chinese girl next." - p.337-338
"The lie comes out easily: you look him straight in the eye, the good actress, the good wife, you've been prepared for this. The relationship will not survive the brutality of absolute honesty, you know that." - p.343
That's A LOT of quotes!
"As Cole is on top of you on this wide hotel bed you're looking at the numbers of the clock radio by the bed flicking over their numbers and you're thinking of Marilyn Monroe who said I don't think I do it properly -- you read it in a newspaper once with astonishment and relief : so, someone else, and what a someone else. . .The numbers on the clock radio are taking too long to flip over as you lie on the bed, with Cole on top of you. Something has slid away, deep in you." - p.17
"You're more than happy to write the word cock; saying it aloud, however, is another matter. It even feels a little odd to say vagina but you're not sure what else to use. You hate pussy, you don't know any woman who says it, and as for cunt, you always think it's used by men who don't like women very much. You want some words that women have colonised for themselves; maybe they exist but you haven't heard them yet. You can't say down there for the rest of your life." - p.23
"I can't tell you how many clients get absolutely no pleasure whatsoever out of bog-standard penetration, she said,. . .We just don't know how to please ourselves enough. We'll never learn. We're still too intent on the man's pleasure at the expense of our own." - p.31
"But here, now, something dormant within you is stretching awake, is arching its back. For just a fleeting moment you imagine yourself naked with your legs wide and several anonymous, assessing men and their hands running over you. You imagine being filmed, being bought. You smile at Cole. What are you thinking, he asks. Nothing, you murmur." - p.36
"All women must want children eventually, you're sure, that furious need is deep in their bones, you don't quite believe any woman who says she doesn't." - p.38
"Going down on him. This, only this, is guaranteed to make him come. Sometimes you go down on him just to get it all over with quickly. Cole pushes your head on to him as far as he can and then a little further, and when you bob up for air he measures with his thumb and finger how far you've gone and duly you marvel, the good wife, and bob down again. You often gag, or have to break the rhythm to come up for air, your jaw always aches, it goes on too long. You hate the taste of sperm, you recoil from it, like a tongue on cold metal in winter." - p.44
(After recalling a lot of old happy memories from the beginning of her relationship) "But those moments, now, seem like scenes from a movie; not quite real. The woman in them is removed, someone else. This is real, now : you've shut down, there are other things you'd rather do. It's such a bother removing all your clothes and finding time to do it and making sure you smell sweet and clean. It never seems the best time, for both of you at once, there's always something that's not quite right. Either you're not in the mood or Cole isn't and it's become easy to make an excuse." - p.45
"It's not so much the thought of them physically together, it's the intimacy in his voice. It wasn't until you overheard it in the hotel room that you realised how long it'd been since you had heard it. And you missed it, violently so. Your voice." - p.77
"It's her actions you can't understand, not Cole's. You always assumed she was the one person you'd have your whole life, not, perhaps, your mother ot your husband. She's a woman, she knows the rules. Men do not. . . You can't bear to think of them together. You have no idea how Theo is with a man. How she operates, if she turns into someone else; if she changes her manner and voice." - p.79
"Cole needs you for a party. . .You know the kind of wife Cole wants for this. He's told you before you're good arm candy: everyone likes you, thinks your sweet, lovely, wants to chat with you, but it means the supreme achievement is that everyone is admiring of Cole, for he's showing off a possession, like a car or a gold watch or a suit, and you're flavouring people's impressions that he's a success. . .You always give in, have done it your whole life; where does it come from, this stubborn need to be liked?" - p.81-82
"You don't have, anymore, a sanctuary in kindness and good deeds and surrender; you're changing, you can feel the souring. A thrill plumes through you when couples split, a feeling that order's restored, that it's the way we're all meant to be, alone." - p.88
"But something is beginning to unfold within you. An idea: to live less tentatively, more selfishly. You're intrigued by people who seem foolish and passionate and ridiculous, but alive with all the mess that entails. You've always been too cautious. . . You wonder about mining a more dangerous seam of yourself. You'd like to try harder to be beautiful, or at least interesting." - p.89
"An emptiness rules at its core, a rottenness, a silence when one of you retires to bed without saying goodnight, when you eat together without conversation, when the phone's passed wordlessly to the other. An emptiness when every night you lie in the double bed, restlessly awake, astounded at how closely hate can nudge against love, can wind around it sinuously like a cat. An emptiness when you realise that the loneliest you've ever been is within a marriage, as a wife." - p.92
"You notice the nape of his neck: how odd to be attracted to someone just by a glance at their neck." - p.93
"You imagine this Gabriel Bonilla naked, your palm on his chest, reading the span of it and the beating heart, and you cross your legs and squeeze your thighs and smile like a ten-year-old who's just been caught with the last of her grandmother's chocolates." - p.99
"You tell yourself you will never spoil it all by sleeping with him, will never have the connection stained by that. You don't want sudden awkwardness, don't want sour sleeper's breath in the morning or unflushed toilets and smoker's breath or farts. It took you a year to fart when Cole was in an adjoining room, two to fart in the same room." - p.100
"He asked you to think of the most sensuous thing you could imagine and yell it out, and there was uncomfortable laughter and then silence. Skin to skin, said your former student suddenly. Someone else, foie gras. The softness of a baby's thighs. Swimming, naked, at midnight. The smell of freshly cut grass. Faure's 'Sanctus'. A girlfriend's laugh. Until there was only you left. Kissing the back of your husband's neck, you said, while he was absorbed in his work." - p.110
"You cannot sleep, cannot sleep, and then it's dawn. Love is attention and you're not getting any: you're like a balloon that's jerked free from the fist holding it down and is now climbing and swerving in a choppy sky.
You think of other things, in bed, alone. They're with you most nights, to lull you to sleep. A group of men waching you being penetrated by a broom handle. You don't know any of the perpetrators very well. It's never intimate or tender. It's filmed. Sometimes women will be watching the penetration; by candlesticks, by animals, sometimes to women will be participating. And the men. Hands will be running over your naked body, parting your legs, probing, slipping inside. Almost every night you imagine these things to drop you into sleep. . . Now, alone, you're bound by caution. Have you ever acted, as an adult, exactly as you wished?" - p.111-112
"But you have no number, no address. And he doesn't have yours. He is gone.
You feel drained. It took so much effort to get to this point, to overcome the nausea and nerves, to resolve to pick up the phone. You didn't realise how much you were counting on the possibility of him, a new something to fill your life, until he was lost." - p.115
"He told you afterwards as he rubbed your flat belly that he could never sleep with a woman over thirty, he didn't like them enough: the sagging skin on their necks, the lines on their faces, the bodies thickening out. But you another reason, now, because by then women have lost their docility, they have awareness, the know too much." - p.119-120
"Whenever you did make love it was your thoughts that stirred you more than the touch of the man. He never knew that he wasn't at the centre of your focus while he was on you, that he was merely kick-starting the film in your head. As he pushed inside you'd slip into concentrating on a scenario that would trigger your pleasure. It all had little to do with the person making love to you. You never found the sex sexy; maybe it would come with the next man or the next but it never combusted for you." - p.120
"What you want:
The lights turned off. A touch that's gentle, slow, provocative, that builds you up, that makes you want it too much. An orgasm. . .Eye contact. . .Holding afterwards, skin to skin. Oral sex, precisely where you ask, for as long and as soft and as slow as you'd like. Sex that's uncomplicated, with no ties, where the man will do exactly what you want. Claiming happiness for yourself : you're so used to focusing on your partner's pleasure at the expense of your own.
What you do not want:
To suck a penis. The smell of stale smoke. . .A thrusting so hard it burns, it hurts. . .To be asked what are you thinking. For it to be pushed upon ou when you're tired, grubby, not yet wet. . .A rush to get in. A penis that's too big. Loud snorting at climax, or groaning, or any expression like 'ooh yes, baby' and 'cmon'. For the roll-over after the coming to be too abrupt. To be kicked out too quick.
What you love:
The arch of the foot, its bones, rake-splayed. Wide, blunt, clean fingernails. Michelangelo wrists. Cleanliness. The nape of your neck nuzzled. Your eyelids kissed. Burrowing deep under the blankets. Clothes to be drawn off slowly, in exquisite anticipation. Cold, smooth walls you are rammed against. The sound of a lover's breath close to your ear. Your hair pulled back when he's inside. Your name spoken aloud just before he comes. Connecting, a holiness fluttering within you both. Seduction that's slow, intriguing, unique, by flattery, extravagant gestures, text: poem scraps on napkins, filthy emails that should never be sent, love letters scrawled on underground passes, a line composed in lipstick on your back as you sleep, written backwards, to be read in the mirror; oh yes, all that." - p.121-122
"The Library gives you a feeling of industriousness, props your life. You dress as if going to work." - p.128
"He's making you feel so alive, just being around him. You've always loved people like that: heart lifters, not heart sinkers. He's making you laugh again, with your eyes. You talk as if this is the last time you'll ever talk and there's so little time and you need to know everything, now, before it's too late." - p.139
"He's making you feel beautiful. Wanted. Confident. Unique. Cole never sees you as any of that, he loves to tell you how you are, what you're life; to box you up tight." - p.140
"You're loving the silkiness of distraction, of flirting with possibility and relaxing into play." - p.149
"Your nails are painted for the first time in years and you keep on forgetting and catch in the corner of your eye the octopus fingers, it's as if they're weighed down with a life of their own. You write neater with them and eat neater and less." - p.152
"You're readying your life, but for what? You don't know where all the flirting and phone calls will end up. Does Gabriel feel the same as you? You don't dare to think ahead too much, for you don't want this melted under the heat of your attention, don't want it gone from your life." - p.153
"Cunt. You've always hated that word and yet suddenly it arouses you; you smile, secretly, dirtily, when you say it in your head." - p.155
"You feel an intoxicating freedom when Cole is not withyou, and yet you don't want him gone. You think of the two types of aloneness you've known recently: this wonderful, sparkly, soul-refreshing type, and the despairing loneliness that sucks the breath from your life." - p.159
"How they've seduced:
Slow, enquiring fingers on your skin in an Edinburgh flat and you took off your pyjamas as something flooded through you and you could not dam it.
Marijuana, once, but you fell asleep.
Alcohol. Champagne always worked best.
Porn. A video to soften you up and you were intrigued at first but the monotony quickly repelled and it was the coldest, most unimaginative fuck you'd ever had.
The urgency in a kiss.
An expensive hotel room that made you feel guilty.
. . .
Letters. Letters have always worked.
But how would you seduce? How would you guard against scaring a man off?
They seem, often, so flighty, difficult, contrary, easily spooked. And you're not convinced it's the men always chasing for in most of your experiences and your girlfriends' it's always the woman biting the bullet and doing the asking out, the hunting down. The looking, not the finding." - p.163-164
"You know nothing of him. You've never even been to his flat. There's so much you've never asked. Deliberately, because you don't want to hear about a girlfriend in the wings, or a wife. It's better if you don't know, so that the spell is never broken; you're not ready for that." - p.166
"A gift box is delivered. It's beautifully wrapped.
A vibrator.
You gasp. There's no note. It's obscene, fascinating, ridiculous. . .It's small enough to keep in your handbag and your fingers brush it often, imagining exotic trips and Customs officers searching your luggage, having to explain it, stammering. You've never been searched, you've always been too innocent-looking and respectable for that." - p.170
"He's wended his way into every corner of your life, he's a plasterer's fine residue, dust under a bed, a white film on a shower screen that keeps coming back and back no matter how furiously you wipe. You will him to surprise you, knowing in your heart he won't." - p.178
"Why won't he call, to put your mind at rest? Did he never want to fuck you? Did he just want a friendship, do heterosexual males ever just want that? Was he stricken with embarassment? Did he find himself falling for you and think it could never work?. . .The questions, the questions and the wind bloes through all your nights, rattling the panes and whining to be let in." - p.179
"Is it love, obsession, infatuation? You don't know. You think of a strange and beautiful word you read about once, Limerance, a psychological term, meaning an obsessive love, a state that's almost like a drug. Need like a wolf paces the perimeter of your world, back and forth, back and forth, never letting up." - p.182
"It's remarkable how similar most of the men's techniques were and yet how distinct each one is in your memory even if the name is not. You remember the unpleasant experiences more vividly than the pleasant ones; you remember why they didn't work. And your let-down. That it wasn't better than what you'd hoped, at the start, as your clothes were coming off. You always masked it." - p.187
"Why are women so constrained about pleasing themselves, why are they so focused on everyone else's pleasure at the expense of their own? What happens if they try to live selfishly?" - p.188-189
"Your pleasure is giving him pleasure, it arouses him and he asks nothing physically of you in return: no one has taught him to do that, to expect. He's your first lover who's utterly selfless, there's no request to go down on him, it's purely unselfish, feminine sex." - p.210
"You're a good wife, a good actress: it's surprisingly easy, the cover-up. . .But where does desire go? Will this fugitive feeling eventually die out? Or now that it's loosened will it lurk within you into old age. all rangy and discontented, just waiting to trip up your life?" - p.214
"Gabriel has fallen in love and you almost despise him for it; it's all messy before you, he's a man wild with uncertainty and want. He's broken the rules; insisting on exclusivity and demanding rights. You're not sure, suddenly, what it was that bound you to him. Infatuation, perhaps. The craving for a man to be tender with, to touch. The challenge, the thrill of the chase. Revenge." - p.228-229
"You imagine Gabriel waiting for the call that will not come. You've waited so many times in the past; a hostage to a lover's silence and you know too well the heart-slam of what it's like. You're tinkering so thoughtlessly with his life and not cleaning up the mess. You've created a woman's dream lover who knows something of the secrets of what women really want, and what they don't. But what do women really want?
You're not sure, now.
A cherishing? Money? Security?
They don't, necessarily, want to fall in love." - p.236
"Nothing works, it's utterly unerotic, it hurts. The woman stands back, watches, plays with a button on her shirt. You feel your body shutting down, bit by bit, like an office block's lights being switched off at night. You push the men off and tell them to leave. . .You cannot look them in the face; you stumble to the bathroom, the taste of metal in your mouth. You lock yourself in and sit on the toilet, shaking, and then suddenly retch into the toilet bowl, retch and retch, as if you are trying to heave your insides out." - p.238-239
"How many times had you said I love you in your twenties to men who didn't answer? That's beautiful, one said, beautiful, as if he was collecting the phrase in a scrapbook, pinning it to a display board like so many butterflies. How many times has something died within you as the words slipped from your mouth? And now you're on the other side, doing it back." - p.246
"But what is this urge within you, this madness kicking out as strong as a horse in a box? You sit on the edge of the couch, your fingers worry the cushion's edge, you bite your lip. You do not understand this want to do it all again, right now, to run from the room's quiet and find more and more anonymous fucks. This urge within you that is brutal, terrible, masculine, beautiful, base, that cannot be stamped out, that is all, bewilderingly, back." - p.249
"You read an article by Germaine Greer, that with motherhood women willingly endure a catastrophic decline in their quality of life. You read a scrap from Sylvia Plath's journal, that she would feel more of a prisoner as an older, tense, cynical career girl than as a richly creative wife and mother who's always growing intellectually. Did she believe this? Do you?" - p.258-259
"You're not sure why you're here but it feels magnificent to be doing something so foolish and impetuous and reckless and rash, to stop all the censoring of yourself." - p.318
"Suddenly it seems so unthinking and reckless to act on impulse to have him back; and just once. Men lure ex-lovers all the time - why, now in the thick of it, are you suddenly so uncomfortable?" - p.324
"And then, very softly, he chuckles: well then, I think I might try a Chinese girl next.
It's stunning; that moment. . .So, a Chinese girl next, like a different chocolate from the chocolate box, perhaps? You shut your eyes: don't say that, please, you think, please don't be like any other man." - p.333
"In that moment, a whole other possibility has been opened up. That he'd planned it all along." - p.334
"But then anger comes.
At all the times in the past you've said I love you and felt stripped. All the times they never rang back. All the love affairs that evaporated, bleakly, into one-night stands. All the times they've drowned you out. Drained your energy. You confidance. Stood you up. Walked out. Wanted a Chinese girl next." - p.337-338
"The lie comes out easily: you look him straight in the eye, the good actress, the good wife, you've been prepared for this. The relationship will not survive the brutality of absolute honesty, you know that." - p.343
That's A LOT of quotes!