“For a writer, every rejection is a small cut … until he bleeds to death.”

“I call them "The Tattooed Gerneration," those people who think it cool to use their bodies as canvasses; to desecrate themselves with ugly designs, inane sayings and the names of women who divorced them. And they call it ART? If they want art, let them go to an art gallery and buy a painting. If God wanted our bodies used to display artwork, he would have made us flat.”

“My two favorited pasttimes are sex and golf, in that order, although, as I grow older I find myself assessing their order of preference.”

“The Divine Light is always in man, presenting itself to the senses and to the comprehension, but man rejects it.”

“For Alice and Mattia, the high school years were an open wound that had seemed so deep that it could never heal. They had passed through them without breathing, he rejecting the world and she feeling rejected by it, and eventually they had noticed that it didn't make all that much difference. They had formed a defective and asymmetrical friendship, made up of long absences and much silence, a clean and empty space where both could come back to breathe when the walls of their school became too close for them to ignore the feeling of suffocation.”

“He collected the stories of people like himself, mostly keeping silent and listening. He slowly discovered that the stories were similar, that there was a process, and that the process involved immersion, putting your whole head under until you touched the bottom and only then coming up for air.”

“(Isabelle) “You can do whatever you’d like at my house.”He raised his eyebrows and grinned.“Within reason,” she added. “If I find you in my bed with a woman, you’re a dead man.”He grinned bigger.Her stomach knotted. “Did I say that?”He continued to grin.She had said it. Must be the fatigue. Three hours of sleep didn’t cut it.He stepped closer. Oh, boy.“Izzy, the only woman I want in that bed is you.”