“A new life? There’s not such thing.It was only in the magazine headlines that people got a new life. Stopped drinking or taking drugs, found a new love. But the same life.”

“Real love is to offer your life at the feet of another.”

“This wasn't the way he had expected his life to be. It worked, but that was about all. Happiness had got lost somewhere along the way.”

“That's what love looks like. It can happen. Two people can find one another, and then work together to sustain that amorphous, incomprehensible third party that has arisen between them. Love becomes an entity unto itself; the thing that determines how life is to be lived.”

“What he was scared of was not that maybe she was a creature who survived by drinking other people's blood. No, it was that she might push him away.”

“A little boy was tugging on his pant leg.'Teacher, I have to pee.'Avila woke from his skating dreams and looked around, pointed to some trees by the shore that grew out over the water; the bare network of branches fell like a shielding curtain toward the ice.'You can pee there.'The boy squinted at the trees.'On the ice?''Yes? What is wrong with that? Makes new ice. Yellow.”

“When it comes to life, all you can change is the equivalent of furniture, paint and windows. Doors, maybe. Change the things that are in too bad a state and hope the core holds.”