“And then came months of memories connected to nothing and telling me nothing, and in this ambiguous atmosphere I stopped thinking of him as doomed. The memories themselves were generally pleasant. For at least a week I kept reliving the time he removed a splinter from my foot using surgical tweezers. Strangely, during this same week, a black Labrador retriever was accompanying me around town, appearing out of nowhere and trotting alongside me to the subway or or the grocery store. As with the splinter memory, I had a sense of information being conveyed but through a medium too opaque to be grasped.”

“I looked in vain for LaRoue, my cruelty toward her now in me like a splinter, where it would sit for years in my helpless memory, the skin growing around; what else can memory do? It can do nothing; It pretends to eat the shrapnel of your acts, yet it cannot swallow or chew.”

“Dimitri: "You're burned in my mind forever. There's nothing, nothing in this world that could ever change that'" Rose: "And it was memories like that that made it hard to even comprehend this quest to kill him, even if he is a Strigoi. Yet . . at the same time, it was exactly memories like that that...i had to destroy him. I needed to remember him as the man who'd love me and held me in bed. I needed to remember that that man would'nt want to stay a monster.”

“What happens when she's not my memory anymore? What happens when she's not around to tell me about his belt leaving scars across my two-year-old brother's face or when he whacked her so hard that she lost her hearing for a week? Who'll be my memory?"Santangelo doesn't miss a beat. "I will. Ring me.""Same," Raffy says.I look at him. I can't even speak because if I do I know I'll cry but I smile and he knows what I'm thinking.”

“There used to be a me, but I had it surgically removed.”

“The few weeks I have had at my disposal have not given me the chance to revive and to work through my old memories in such a way that I might offer you a solid introduction into the psychic life of Indians.”