You can't say anything honest to women, they have minds like the FBI. - John Updike

Man is a mechanism for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.

Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it has driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief. There is no God; Janice can die: the two thoughts come at once, in one slow wave. He feels underwater, caught in chains of transparent slime, ghosts of the urgent ejaculations he has spat into the mild bodies of women. His fingers on his knees pick at persistent threads.

Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.