“I'd never understood the injunction not to regret anything, couldn't see how that wasn't cowardice...”

“I couldn't tell if I was perspicacious or paranoid.”

“We speak now or I do, and others do. You've never spoken before. You will. You'll be able to say how the city is a pit and a hill and a standard and an animal that hunts and a vessel on the sea and the sea and how we are fish in it, not like the man who swims weekly with fish but the fish with which he swims, the water, the pool. I love you, you light me, warm me, you are suns.You have never spoken before.”

“A scholar can never let mere wrongness get in the way of the theory.”

“[…] detective novels are not novels of detection, still less of revelation, still less of solution. Those are all necessary, but not only are they insufficient, but they are in certain ways regrettable. These are novels of potentiality. Quantum narratives. Their power isn’t in their final acts, but in the profusion of superpositions before them, the could-bes, what-ifs and never-knows. Until that final chapter, each of those is as real and true as all the others, jostling realities all dreamed up by the crime, none trapped in vulgar facticity. That’s why the most important sentence in a murder mystery isn’t the one starting ‘The murderer is…’ – which no matter how necessary and fabulously executed is an act of unspeakable narrative winnowing – but is the snarled expostulation halfway through: ‘Everyone’s a suspect.’ Quite. When all those suspects become one certainty, it’s a collapse, and a let-down. How can it not be? We’ve been banished from an Eden of oscillation.”

“A promise fulfilled may be a classic moment, but prophecies mean anticlimax. How much more awesome was an unexpected salvation?”

“I just can't get with this idea that literature is a 12-step program. If someone wants to read a book to see good people get rewarded and the bad people get punished, essentially what they want is a fairy tale.”