Football is all very well as a game for rough girls, but is hardly suitable for delicate boys.

I am not worried that nobody knows me. I seek to become fit to be known

If you look at their intentions, examine their motives, and scrutinize what brings them contentment — how can people hide who they are? How can they hide who they really are?

I know your kind, he said. What's wrong with you is wrong all the way through you.

He tried to read her heart in her handclasp but he knew nothing.

The heart beneath the breastbone pumping. The blood on its appointed rounds. Life in small places, narrow crannies. In the leaves, the toad's pulse. The delicate cellular warfare in a waterdrop. A dextrocardiac, said the smiling doctor. Your heart's in the right place. Weathershrunk and loveless. The skin drawn and split like an overripe fruit.

He had a tattoo of a bird on his neck done by someone with an ill-formed notion of their appearance.

In truth they did not look like men who might have whiskey they hadnt drunk.

The consequences of an act are often quite different from what one would guess. You must be sure that the intention in your heart is large enough to contain all wrong turnings, all disappointments

He'd half meant to speak but those eyes had altered the world forever in the space of a heartbeat.

What runs so contrary to received wisdom is that it really is the male who is the aesthete while the woman is drawn to abstractions. Wealth. Power. What a man seeks is beauty, plain and simple. No other way to put it. The rustle of her clothes, her scent. The sweep of her hair across his naked stomach. Categories all but meaningless to a woman. Lost in her calculations.

He said that the world could only be known as it existed in men's hearts. For while it seemed a place which contained men it was in reality a place contained within them and therefore to know it one must look there and come to know those hearts and to do this one must live with men and not simply pass among them.