Fucking was poetry unbound.

That's what Jamie didn't understand: it was never just sex. Even the fastest, dirtiest, most impersonal screw was about more than sex. It was about connection. It was about looking at another human being and seeing your own loneliness and neediness reflected back. It was recognising that together you had the power to temporarily banish that sense of isolation. It was about experiencing what it was to be human at the basest, most instinctive level. How could that be described as just anything?

Real love should draw no blood from the loved and buckets from the lover.

Sarah felt like the bad girl in an eighties teen flick. The girl with big hair and a tight shirt who seduces the nice girl’s boyfriend but loses him in the end, because she’s shallow and tacky and no match for a sweet girl with good morals and freshly scrubbed skin.

And reading this way - with no deadline, no agenda - she remembered why she loved literature so much. It was like fucking a new man and knowing that he had made other women come, but that when she came it would be an unshareable, untranslatable pleasure. She opened herself up to her books, and the words got inside her and fucked her senseless.

Sarah learnt a lot from Alex. Like the way men could say one thing, then another, then act in a way inconsistent with both positions and somehow still be convinced of their own integrity.