Words&Dirt

“I’d be the sexual yardstick for his whole life: Jack would spend the rest of his days trying but failing to relive the experience of being given everything at a time when he knew nothing. Like a tollbooth in his memory, every partner he’d have afterward would have to pass through the gate of my comparison, and it would be a losing equation. The numbers could never be as favorable as they were right now, when his naïveté would be subtracted from my expertise to produce the largest sum of astonishment possible.”

––Tampa, by Alissa Nutting, pg. 96

“We are an integrated package, not a cluster of independent modules.”

–– “Responses,” by Patricia S. Churchland and Christopher L. Suhler, Moral Psychology, Vol. 4, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, pg. 342