All Fours: A Novel

If you had hormonal constancy, as men did, you might not be taking your cues from your body about when to rest. You would have to build that in: Sunday is the day we don’t work, God’s day. But if what defined the days was you, your biological clock and calendar, then every day might as well be Tuesday. Perhaps you wanted to work for two weeks solid

I can never quite explain how the terms of my success are built upon an agreement to carry this person on my back for the rest of my life. There has to be a burden to keep everything in balance.

A different kind of person would have commented on what had just happened, made a joke or offered to get me napkins. By not doing any of these things, he was complicit, inside the performance with me. But it wasn’t a performance, was it? No, nothing I did ever was. It was only ever the truth of the moment, coming out freely and expecting to be unde

Now, for the first time, I understood what all the fuss was about. How something beautiful could strike your heart, move you, bring you down on your knees and then, somewhat perversely, you wanted to fuck that pure, beautiful thing. Sex was a way to have it, to not just look at it but to be with it.

So, this was the cost of that free feeling each morning. Brutal. But there was enough hypocrisy built into life, one shouldn’t choose it. “I think this is good,” I rasped. “Yeah?” “Yeah.” We looked at each other in shock, like two people hovering in the air with nothing holding them up. No scaffolding, no strings, no wings—but not falling.

You had to withstand a profound sense of wrongness if you ever wanted to get somewhere new.

you couldn't think your way to a physical place, you had to go there.

Nobody knows what’s going on. We are thrown across our lives by winds that started blowing millions of years ago.

“Remember the Simone de Beauvoir quote,” she said, “ ‘You can’t have everything you want but you can want everything you want.’