“He wondered...if the journey of a life with pain was simply finding more and more layers of acceptance, that at best the most constant tether would be that he would never really find the bottom, that the bottom had different levels, and that no matter how good he tried to be, sometimes he would sink into a hole.”

“He'd just called Shawn a bottom, though, and Shawn looked pissed. Call Remy a bottom and he would jump you and let you screw his brains out. Call Thiago a bottom and he would look at you for five minutes, shrug, and the go about his business. Call Nikolaus a bottom and he might cry. Call Brandt a bottom and you might get a blowjob, you might just get blown up. But call Shawn a bottom?Carl supposed he was about to find out what happened when you called Shawn a bottom.”

“As Michael pondered how shallow he had been, he was struck by another thought. It wasn't simply that he hadn't gone deep enough. It was rather that he had grown accustomed to wading in pools that had no depth to begin with. A turn toward holiness would be a turn toward a different life altogether - to a life where different things mattered than had mattered in the past. Did he desire such a life? He knew that of all the questions, this was the most important.”

“On the other hand, he was compassionate because he knew pain, real pain, and real suffering too. Yet even in those bouts when it looked for sure as if he would die, he was never given morphine, not even as his screams of pain rattled the palace windows. That poor child had traveled to the bottom of life and back again, and naturally that had had a profound effect on him.”

“In fact, if he stood here staring at her bottom for very much longer, he would be saluting her with something much more tangible than an imaginary sword.”

“He felt that he had to find Salander and hold her close. She would probably bite him if he tried.”