“I would rather avoid disaster than take it out for dinner and a movie. - Chynna Lennox”

“If I could really love, I would take awaythese tubes dripping lipids and glucoseinto your blood. I would liquefy the thingsyou love and flood them through your veins:our sleeping dogs' rhythmic breathing, hugeorange trumpets of the amaryllis we thoughtwould never bloom, the crunch of the gravelroad coming home. If I could really love,I would climb onto your narrow backand wrap myself around, guarding likea ladybug, or Achilles' mighty shield.”

“But can't it sometimes take one to tango? Don't underserved blows often come out of the blue?”

“What happened was that I caught a glimpse of something I desperately needed to believe in at that point in my life. I wanted to believe there could be something within you that was so essential and so courageous that nothing - no boyfriend, no employer, no trauma - could tarnish or rob you of it. And if you had that kind of unbreakable core, not only would it always be yours, but even in your darkest moments others would see it in you, and help you out before the worse came to the absolute worst.”

“I did not want to live out my life in the strenuous effort to hold a ghost world together. It was plain as the stars that time herself moved in grand tidal sweeps rather than the tick-tocks we suffocate within, and that I must reshape myself to fully inhabit the earth rather than dawdle in the sump of my foibles.”

“I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony. ... A lot of good fiction is sentimental. ... The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior, and then he just dries up. ... I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.”

“Go away," he said. "Go away. I wish you had never come here. I wish I had never heard of the Light and the Dark, and your damned old Merriman and his rhymes. If I had your golden harp now I would throw it in the sea. I am not a part of your stupid quest anymore, I don't care what happens to it. And Cafall was never a part of it either, or a part of your pretty pattern. He was my dog, and I loved him more than anything in the world, and now he is dead. Go away.”