“All the metaphors in this world wouldn’t scratch the surface of what stepping into darkness is like for me. And that’s just darkness. Don’t get me started on light. Really, don’t get me started on light.”

“but it was humanly good to be touched too, to be alone with someone at the secret feast that went all the way back to Adam and Eve. You looked at each other and felt just how old the contract was, the warm-faced commitment to the adventure, the stepping together out of the light into the rewarding darkness.”

“For the love of Mary, I get it, she's got a nifty twat. Tell me what I need to know and you can go up there and try'n get back into it.”

“Werewolves are not the subject of academe,” she said, “but you know what the professors would be saying if they were. ‘Monsters die out when the collective imagination no longer needs them. Species death like this is nothing more than a shift in the aggregate psychic agenda. In ages past the beast in man was hidden in the dark, disavowed. The transparency of modern history makes that impossible: We’ve seen ourselves in concentration camps, the gulags, the jungles, the killing fields, we’ve read ourselves in the annals of True Crime. Technology turned up the lights and now there’s no getting away from the fact: The beast is redundant. It’s been us all along.”

“Once you've stopped loving someone breaking his or her heart's just an unpleasant chore you have to get behind you. My God, you really don't love me anymore, do you? No matter your decency the victim's incredulity's potentially hilarious. You manage not to laugh.”

“Don't kill me—you fucking cunt.Hot tip. If you're trying to get someone to not kill you, avoid calling him a fucking cunt.”

“Some part of me . . . had been waiting, since Kelp's death, for certainty that God . . . was either dead or malicious. On the cot, now, in the rain-shadowed room with the medicine smells, I knew it was worse than that. They were a challenge, a dare: you must look at the horrors of the world and find a way back to faith in spite of what you saw. I had a glimpse of what the purer version of myself might be capable of: enduring the loss, keeping the rage and disgust down, finding meaning through suffering. But it was only a glimpse. There was so much shame, and the shame made me angry at the thought of getting better.”