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hay. If her follicles had a different juice in them, you wouldn’t think twice about her.”
    8. Edmund White,
The Married Man.
You might read this novel while listening to the slow jazz of a weary-hearted sax player.
The Married Man
is a winning portrait of gay Paris in the 1980s, a satire of American university life, a semi-autobiographical portrait of the artist, an unsparing AIDS chronicle, but above all it is an utterly convincing love story. White’s plangent, autumnal voice—like a loved one’s whisper in the night—gradually summons up a lost world of wit and languor, of champagne dinners and simple lunches on sun-dappled terraces. But gradually this earthly paradise gives way to T-cell counts, and the novel’s last quarter is a journey into the dark.
    9. Philip Roth,
The Dying Animal.
A harrowing short novel about a cultivated man of seventy, a lifelong hedonist, who takes up with a voluptuous twenty-four-year-old student. After a period of the sheerest lust, Roth’s hero suddenly finds himself suffering “these crazy distortions of longing, doting, possessiveness, even of love.” Without quite knowing it, he confesses, “attachment creeps in. The eternal problem of attachment.”
    10.Zadie Smith,
On Beauty.
“People talk about the happy quiet that can exist between two lovers, but this too was great; sitting between his sister and his brother, saying nothing, eating. . . .” This masterly novel takes up the myriad forms of Eros—first love, family happiness, irrational and illicit desire—and does so in language that can mirror the cultured speech of a British academic or the hip-hop patter of a black street poet. In the end, the readerfalls in love with the entire Belsey family, in all its quarrelsome, well-meaning confusion.
THE WISDOM OF EXPERIENCE
    The magic of first love is our ignorance that it can ever end. —Benjamin Disraeli
    The reason why so few marriages are happy is because young ladies spend their time in making nets, not in making cages. —Jonathan Swift
    Much can be inferred about a man from his mistress: in her one beholds his weaknesses and his dreams.—Georg Lichtenberg
    Were it not for imagination, Sir, a man would be as happy in the arms of a chambermaid as of a Duchess.—Samuel Johnson
    Such things as an absence, the refusal of an invitation, or an unintentional coldness accomplish more than all the cosmetics and fine clothes in the world.—Marcel Proust
    No man is offended by another man’s admiration of the woman he loves; it is the woman only who can make it a torment. —Jane Austen
    To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god. —Jorge Luis Borges
    Romanticism is what brings a couple together, but realism is what sees them through.—John Updike
    The truth is that what is interesting about love is how it doesn’t work out.—Howard Moss
    That which we call sin in others, is experiment for us. —Ralph Waldo Emerson
    Man survives earthquakes, epidemics, the horror of disease, and all the agonies of the soul, but for all time his most tormenting tragedy has been, is, and will be the tragedy of the bedroom.—Leo Tolstoy
    The best of men and the best of women may sometimes live together all their lives, and . . . hold each other lost spirits to the end.—Robert Louis Stevenson
    It is never any good dwelling on good-bys. It is not the being together that it prolongs, it is the parting.—Elizabeth Bibesco
    For a dark play-girl in a night-club I have pined away. ... If this thoughtless woman were to die there would be nothing left to live for, if this faithless girl forgot me there would be no one for whom to write.—Cyril Connolly
    After discovering that his wife had left him for another man: “I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live but I am told that this is a common experience.”—Evelyn Waugh
    She wasn’t too big,