“...and then he looks at me in that way of his, that way that suggests you aren't exactly a human being, but rather a possible cog, a potential working part of one of his mysterious ideas.”

“I opened the book to the title page, which said the book was "A Fictional Memoir." I had no idea what this meant, except that maybe it was one of the ways that Exley was crazy: maybe when he called his book a fictional memoir, it meant that he couldn't make up his mind, which is one of the things people really mean when they call someone crazy.”

“They [my eyes] immediately started to tear up, tears being your eyes' way of forbidding you to look away,of forcing you to look at the world you've made or unmade. ”

“... I also empathized, because she'd tried to do these things out of love, and because she had bumbled the attempt, and I suppose this - the ability to empathize with the people we hate - is exactly the quality that makes us human beings, which makes you wonder why anyone would want to be one.”

“The past comes back once and then it keeps coming back and coming back, not just one part of the past but all of it, the forgotten crowd of your life breaks out of the gallery and comes rushing at you, and there is no sense in hiding from the crowd, it will find you; it's your crowd, you're the only one it's looking for.”

“About me as a drinker: I wasn't much of one and had a short, bad history of doing it. The few times I'd tried drinking I either became too much like myself or not enough, but either way it was always calamity on top of calamity and I found myself saying way too much about too little and doing the wrong things in the wrong places. Once, at my boss's Christmas party, I passed out for a minute - passed out but still, like a zombie, remained fully ambulatory and mostly functional - and when I came to, I found myself in my boss's kitchen, the refrigerator door open and me next to it at the counter, spreading mayonnaise onto two slices of wheat bread and licking the knife after each pass before I stuck it back in the jar. I heard someone cough or gag, looked up, and saw the kitchen's population staring at me, all of their mouths open and slack, obviously wondering what I thought I was doing, exactly, and all I could think to say was, "Sandwich." Which is what I said. And then, to prove my point, whatever the point was, I ate it. The sandwich, that is.”

“They looked at each other for a while their gazes steady, unblinking. It was the way people stare at each other not when they're in love but afterward, when they finally realize all the many horrible and beautiful things locked up within that love.”