Still, there are moments. Different women, different nights, when he lies in embrace, steeped in a woman’s flesh until the brew is intolerably joyous. There are love harvestings, sometimes months in a row when there is one woman, one affair, and a proud secret knowledge of each other’s loins, admirable matings, sensitive and various, lewd or fierce or dallying gently, sometimes sweet and innocent like young lovers.

Only it never lasts.”

— Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead