“The serpent tries to engulf my head. No, not a snake, an oxygen mask.”

“My words were Egyptian hieroglyphics before the discovery of the Rosetta stone; my words were wounded soldiers limping home, guns spent, from a lost battle; my words were dying fish, flipping hysterically as the net is opened and the pile spreads across the boat deck like a slippery mountain trying to become a prairie.My words were, and are, unworthy of Marianne Engel.”

“All history is just one man trying to take something away from another man, and usually it doesn't really belong to either of them.”

“…She kissed me on my thin lips and all my words were pushed back into my mouth. “I don’t want to die,” she whispered, “but I need to lose the shackles of this multitude of hearts.”

“My first, and most lasting, addiction has always been to the obsessive study of any matter that took hold of my curiosity.”

“Boredom was my bedmate and it was hogging the sheets.”

“My flesh began to singe as if I were a scrap of meat newly thrown onto the barbecue, and then i could hear the bubbling of my skin as the flames kissed it.”