“This is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark.”

“This is what intimacy does to us over time. That's what a long marriage can do: It causes us to inherit and trade each other's stories. (p.237)”

“The story of human intimacy is one of constantly allowing ourselves to see those we love most deeply in a new, more fractured light. Look hard. Risk that.”

“While the archetype of the tinker is generally the whipping person in classical bedtimes stories, this particular individual was a tinker by trade and just happened to be economically disadvantaged.”

“Nothing is more incendiary to an ill-advised, unanticipated tryst than to be enclosed in a darkened, plush-upholstered, moving chamber. Privacy, Intimacy, Darkness, Transience: the Four Whorsemen of the Apocalypse.”

“Stick a shovel into the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light. Good for trade, we thrive on bones; without them there'd be no stories.”