“Walk with care in dark places, and do not put your faith in anyone who promises you the forgiveness of the Lord or a certain place in Paradise.”

“..which should teach you something about this world. That it's a place where whatever you work for and care about is bound to be taken away from you sooner or later, and there isn't a thing you can do about it.”

“I can see in your eyes that there’s no seam of untapped joy left in you. The best of life has come and gone. Those days when sudden epiphanies swept over you, and you had visions of the rightness of all things and of your place amongst them; they’re history. You’re in a darker place now.”

“This is a forsaken place...I can think of no use for a place like this, except that you could say of it: I saw the heart of nothing, and survived.”

“Of all the rash and midnight promises made in the name of love, none, Boone now knew, was more certain to be broken than "I'll never leave you.”

“Well, here he was. They could save each other, the way the poets promised lovers should. He was mystery, he was darkness, he was all she had dreamed of. And if she would only free him he would service her - oh yes - until her pleasure reached that threshold that, like all thresholds, was a place where the strong grew stronger, and the weak perished. Pleasure was pain there, and vice versa. And he knew it well enough to call it home.”

“Gather experience... Look at what you should not look at. A feeling of anxiety is the sure and certain evidence that you should do this.”