“You are my beauty, my body, perfected. All I was drained off into you. When you left, my health went with you - leaving a moral morbidity I smell in my sleep. The acts I committed for the love of you. Acts I can never forget. I crawled into the bellies of the dead to fish out a little life... I have an appetite for it now. I have an unrelenting lust for death.”

“They will all abandon you. All you have left is my desire for you.”

“As to my mouth, of all my features, I wish I could possess my mouth again, just as it had been before the fire. I had my mother’s lips, generous below and above; and what kissing I had practiced, mainly on my hand or on a lonely pig, had convinced me that my lips would be the source of my good fortune. I would kiss with them, and lie with them, I would make victims and willing slaves of anyone my eyes desired, simply by talking a little, and following the talk with kisses, and the kisses with demands. And they’d melt into compliance, everyone of them, happy to perform the most demeaning acts as long as I was there to reward them with a long, tongue-tied kiss when they were done. But the fire didn’t spare my lips; it took them too, erasing them utterly.”

“I dreamed I spoke in another's language,I dreamed I lived in another's skin,I dreamed I was my own beloved,I dreamed I was a tiger's kin.I dreamed that Eden lived inside me,And when I breathed a garden came,I dreamed I knew all of Creation,I dreamed I knew the Creator's name.I dreamed--and this dream was the finest--That all I dreamed was real and true,And we would live in joy forever,You in me, and me in you.”

“Anyway, it's gone. And there's nothing left in my pocket to charm you. So from now on it's going to have to be tears or nothing I'm afraid.That's all I've got left to tell you see: tears, tears, tears.”

“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.”

“Zombies are the liberal nightmare. Here you have the masses, whom you would love to love, appearing at your front door with their faces falling off; and you’re trying to be as humane as you possibly can, but they are, after all, eating the cat. And the fear of mass activity, of mindlessness on a national scale, underlies my fear of zombies.”