“On the seat beside him, in between him and his father, Ryan's severed hand is resting on a bed of ice in an eight-quart Styrofoam cooler.”

“...he glanced at the stranger in the seat beside him and tried to remember when she used to be his daughter.”

“But you hardley even know him"she said."He could be a serial killer""I did have that thought.I checked the apartment out,but if his got an ice cooler full of arms in it,I havent seen it yet.Anyway he seems pretty since.”

“As i crawled up the bed to sit beside him, my pterodactyl butterflies somersaulted in my stomach. Good God, he was gorgeous and i was in bed with him.”

“Ryan held a strawberry milkshake in one hand, his father's ashes in the other--and hoped like hell he didn't get them mixed up.”

“The last thing Farinoush did on several nights just before she went to bed was to rummage through her cardboard box of old things looking for him. And there he invariably remained, nestled forever between a copy of ‘Jana Aranya’ and ‘The Hours’. She read about thirty pages of his still incomprehensible stage-directions before passing out from exhaustion and hoping that the morning would bring him back to her; yearning to be yanked out of bed by him, devoured by him again. But he never returned.”