“Ayşe has always admired the Ottoman talent for euphemism. The Auspicious Event was the massacre and execution of ten thousand Janissaries. Bodies had been heaped in the Hippodrome, rotting in the June heat. The more perfumed the language, the more brutal the repression.”

“My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker.”

“Although the principle of equality has always been self-evident, it has never been self-executing.”

“Ten people who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent.”

“Yes, she, Claire Parks, who by all rights should have been dead these many years, her bleached bones rotting in the cold ground, was turned on. Waves of heat rolled through her body in liquid surges. The heat became almost incandescent in her breasts and in her loins, but her entire body burned and tingled with heat and life.”

“So you're like a ... an amateur sleuth?""God no. I'm more like the hapless guys in those film-noir flicks we used to watch. I keep getting tangled up in bizarro events.""Oh yes?” His eyes lit with enthusiasm. I was speaking his language now. “Guy Pearce in L.A. Confidential or William Hurt in Body Heat?""I was thinking more like Woody Allen in Play It Again, Sam.”