She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read. The university's "British and American Literature Course Catalog" was, for Madeleine, what its Bergdorf equivalent was for her roommates. A course listing like "Engllish 274: Lyly's Euphues" excited Madeleine the way a pair of Fiorucci cowboy boots did Abby. "English 450A: Hawthorne and James" filled Madeleine with an expectation of sinful hours in bed not unlike what Olivia got from wearing a Lycra skirt and leather blazer to Danceteria.

She had no sympathy for paperback thrillers and detective stories. It was the abandoned hardback, the jacketless 1931 Dial Press edition ringed with many a coffee cup, that pierced Madeleine's heart.

Everyone in the room was so spectral-looking that Madeleine's natural healthiness seemed suspect, like a vote for Reagan.

His best dramatic moments came when the strain on his face from remembering his lines resembled the emotion he was trying to simulate.

"You have to catch all the subtleties for me, don't you? You and your flair for catching subtleties. It must be nice to be rich and sit around all day catching subtleties."

The magnolia trees hadn't read Roland Barthes. They didn't think love was a mental state; the magnolias insisted it was natural, perennial.

As for Madeleine, she was either so used to male attention that she didn't notice it anymore or so guileless that she didn't suspect why three guys might perk themselves in her room like the suitors of Penelope.

Billy took women's studies courses and referred to himself as a feminist. Presently, Billy had one hand sensitively in the back pocket of Madeleine's jeans. She had her hand in the back pocket of his jeans. They were moving along like that, each cupping a handful of the other. In Madeleine's face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.

"A Lover's Discourse" was the perfect cure for lovesickness. It was a repair manual for the heart, its one tool the brain. If you used your head, if you became aware of how love was culturally constructed and began to see your symptoms as purely mental, if you recognized that being "in love" was only an idea, then you could liberate yourself from its tyranny.

Heartbreak is funny to everyone but the heartbroken.

The more girls Bankhead slept with, the more girls wanted to sleep with him. Which made Mitchell uncomfortably aware of how little he knew about girls in the first place.

"People don't save other people. People save themselves."

Old men were playing boules nearby, bending at the knee and releasing silver balls from their fingertips. The balls made pleasant when they struck one another. The sound of satisfactory, social democratic retirement.

She was a large, disordered woman, like a child's drawing that didn't stay within the lines.

Hearing a foreign language coming from people's mouths allowed Mitchell to imagine that everyone was having an intelligent conversation, even the balding woman who looked like Mussolini.

He wanted women to love him, all women, beginning with his mother and going on from there. Therefore, whenever any woman got mad at him, he felt maternal disapproval crashing down upon his shoulders, as if he'd been a naughty boy.

College feminists made fun of skyscrapers, saying they were phallic symbols. They said the same thing about space rockets, even though, if you stopped to think about it, rockets were shaped the way they were not because of phallocentrism but because of aerodynamics. Would a vagina-shaped Apollo 11 have made it to the moon?