“In the early 1980s, Graham worked hard to turn the Repository into a respectable business, rather than a ludicrous one: Graham's wife didn't like keeping the sperm at the Escondido estate. Not only had the house been picketed, but a Japanese trespasser had once made a run at the sperm, only to be nipped by a family dog.”

“Like my father, Donor White could hold in his head the incompatible demands of rationality and irrationality, of facts and love.”

“You have a wife?” Caxton demanded. “I killed a vampire twenty years ago, and another one last night. I had to keep myself busy in the meantime,” he told her.”

“The slumber party took place in what the Methodists called a family room, the Catholics used as an extra bedroom, and the neighborhood's only Jews had turned into a combination darkroom and fallout shelter.”

“I had Japanese once. A business man I had run into in New York ... but that's not what he meant.”

“I couldn't remember ordinary moments, only the ones that had made an impression. Ordinary moments were the ones that fell away first.”

“We're still family-owned, which keeps life a whole lot simpler. When my wife and kids and I decide to make a business move, we don't have to ask Wall Street about it.”