“Some years ago a psychiatrist had told me that finding out things other people didn't want known was my way of trying to stay even with a society filled with people bigger than I was. The remark had been meant to startle, to provoke insight, and eventually to alter my behavior. Instead, I'd simply found that I thoroughly agreed with him and had gone out after a private investigator's license. [Dr. Robert Frederickson AKA Mongo]”

“Fortunately, by the time I'd gotten to the stairs I had finished gasping and stepping on dead people, so I was pretty prepared for the next thing to startle me out of my skin.”

“Even if we had gone away together when I wanted us to, we would've been together for a year, maybe two. But sooner or later, other people would've found a way to wedge us apart.”

“The thing is, you make choices. You do some things and you don't do others and in the end there's not much point in asking what different choices might have gained you, and lost you, unless you have a time machine. You become those choices, you embody them...I'd known I couldn't stay, just as I'd known years before I couldn't be with him, even as I'd gone on pretending I had a choice. I was who I was, and I wanted what I already had.”

“Hey Clark', he said.'Tell me something good'. I stared out of the window at the bright-blue Swiss sky and I told him a story of two people. Two people who shouldn't have met, and who didn't like each other much when they did, but who found they were the only two people in the world who could possibly have understood each other. And I told him of the adventures they had, the places they had gone, and the things I had seen that I had never expected to. I conjured for him electric skies and iridescent seas and evenings full of laughter and silly jokes. I drew a world for him, a world far from a Swiss industrial estate, a world in which he was still somehow the person he had wanted to be. I drew the world he had created for me, full of wonder and possibility.”

“The tears that had been threatening to overflow finally did, coursing down my cheeks. I wanted to run after him, to take back what I'd said, to beg him to stay, but I'd spent my life running after Mal. Instead, I stood in silence and let him go.”