“Her blood-curdling snoring, with its gargling and squawking and its terrifying pauses is like the sound the devil might make if he were alternately relishing and strangling on a pound of human flesh.”

“Their religion was devotion to the human soul. Their sustenance was its flesh and blood. Their limitless love reached out, to what on the surface, they appeared to be. But they were not, that was an illusion.”

“The brain is the only organ that tries to make sense of its pain. It is as if the bone were trying to understand the break, as if the blood vessel could comprehend its rupture. But this is also its greatest impediment to understanding. The mind clings fiercely to any alternative to chaos, even if that alternative is self-destruction.”

“There is a sound to waiting. It sounds like held breath pounding its fists against the walls of the lung, damp and muffled beats.”

“...And a cool four thousand, Pip!"I never discovered from whom Joe derived the conventional temperature of the four thousand pounds, but it appeared to make the sum of money more to him, and he had a manifest relish in insisting on its being cool.”

“In my head this cruel unspeakable truth: that we battled and we cursed and we spilled each other’s blood, we relished our taste of hell and strangled heaven’s love.”