“They understand not only evil, it seemed, but the extravagance of tricks with which evil presents itself as good.”

“harsh lights and narrow hallways, images which did not seem so much theatrical or foreign as imbued with the indelible quality of memory, of experience lived.”

“Side by side they were very much alike, in similarity less of lineament than of manner and bearing, a correspondence of gestures which bounced and echoed between them so that a blink seemed to reverberate, moments later, in a twitch of the other's eyelid.”

“It is easy to see things in retrospect. But I was ignorant then of everything but my own happiness, and I don’t know what else to say except that life itself seemed very magical in those days: a web of symbol, coincidence, premonition, omen. Everything, somehow, fit together; some sly and benevolent Providence was revealing itself by degrees and I felt myself trembling on the brink of a fabulous discovery, as though any morning it was all going to come together–my future, my past, the whole of my life–and I was going to sit up in bed like a thunderbolt and say oh! oh! oh!”

“She looked up at me, her eyes large with compassion, with understanding of the solitude and incivility of grief.”

“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.”

“I don't know. I suppose I should have had a better idea of what I was letting myself in for. Still, the first murder – the farmer – seemed to have been so simple, a dropped stone falling to the lakebed with scarcely a ripple. The second one was also easy, at least at first, but I had no inkling how different it would be. What we took for a docile, ordinary weight (gentle plunk, swift rush to the bottom, dark waters closing over it without a trace) was in fact a depth charge, one that exploded quite without warning beneath the glassy surface, and the repercussions of which may not be entirely over, even now.”