“The sun rose like a stripper, keeping its glory well covered by cloud till it seemed there'd be no show at all.”

“Is there any good news?' Tesla said.Who ever promised that? Who ever said there'd be good news?”

“However this miraculous place worked, it seemed real enough. The sun was hot, the soda was cold, the sky was blue, the grass was green. What more did he need to know?”

“Evil, however powerful it seemed, could be undone by its own appetite.”

“Flesh could not keep its glamour, nor eyes their sheen. They would go to nothing soon. But monsters are forever.”

“And the stories she'd been told, were they confessions of uncommitted crimes, accounts of the worst imaginable, imagined to keep fiction from becoming fact? The thought chased its own tail: these terrible stories still needed a first cause, a well-spring from which they leaped... Were these inventions common currency, as Purcell had claimed? Was there a place, however small, reserved in every heart for the monstrous?”

“You cut up a thing that's alive and beautiful to find out how it's alive and why it's beautiful, and before you know it, it's neither of those things, and you're standing there with blood on your face and tears in your sight and only the terrible ache of guilt to show for it.”