“Lou reluctantly drew back, still holding Joe, and placed his soft lips on Joe's own. Existence reacted to their reunion. Immediately, it was as if two halves became whole once again. The sky flashed colors overhead as they stood together: day to night, night to day. They stood motionless and kissing for so long a period that they might have been mistaken for part of the landscape, as vines climbed up their legs and grass grew around them; as dirt gathered and buried even more the scattered fragments of the abbey. Only the keepers of time knew that lifetimes did indeed pass, possibly entire eras. And yet it was but a scant moment to Joe and Lou. All of it but a simple, longed-for embrace neither time nor death could contain.”

“Joe might have called that place godforsaken but I could see a whole lot of proof that if there was a God, He’d been there.”

“Kiss me, Joe. I won’t shatter… Seriously, Joe, you can touch me without breaking me. In fact, you might even put me a little bit back together.”

“Patrice had long since buried the particulars of events so painful that they caused her to resolve only to see good. With such a stance, such as dissociative split, she could walk with evil and believe it did not exist. She was Joe's perfect mate.”

“He knows that there will be days ahead, long, tedious days which have no real beginning or ending, but which run together into night and out of it without changing color, or sound, or meaning. He will lie in his bed feeling the minutes and the hours pass through his body like an endless ribbon of pain because time becomes pain then. Light and darkness become pain; all his senses exist only to receive it, to transmit to his mind again and again, with ceaseless repetition, the simple fact that now he is dying.”

“Joe arrived late again, but cheerful as ever. He told us about dealing with the customer’s FACC. This stood for ‘Fear, Anxiety, Cynicism, and Confusion’.Joe talked us through page four of the bible, regarding the Dichotomy within ‘the Prospect’. This ‘dichotomy’ was between the pospect’s ‘conscience mind’ and his ‘subconscience mind’. The gifted salesman found a link between the two. I waited a little while and then asked if Joe didn’t mean the prospect’s ‘conscious mind and his subconscious mind’. I hoped I’d get a laugh, but nobody noticed, nor was Joe openly thankful to me for the correction.”