They kept flipping back and forth, but it wasn’t clear which was the more exquisitely pleasurable pain, to penetrate or to be penetrated. - Edmund White

That man's embrace around the waist set me spinning like a dancer across the darkened stage of the city; my turns led me to Fountain Square, the center.

I asked him what it was like to live in a monastery and meditate for a year. He said it was a waste of time, that he never meditated, and that the older monks were interested only in feeling up boys, playing cards, and telling fortunes, that they were a dirty, lazy, superstitious lot.

People say young love or love of the moment isn't real, but I think the only love is the first. Later we hear its fleeting recapitulations throughout our lives, brief echoes of the original theme in a work that increasingly becomes all development, the mechanical elaboration of a crab canon with too many parts.