“he smoked so much marijuana that his hair smelled like a cupboard crammed with oregano;”

“The powerful wind swept his hair away from his face; he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a ship heading into the wind, slicing through the waves of an ocean he’d not yet seen.”

“... the surprised bookseller, whose name (inexplicably) was Mendelssohn. He was no relation to the German composer, and this Mendelssohn either overliked his last name or disliked his first so much that he never revealed it. (When Ted had once asked him his first name, Mendelssohn had said only: "Not Felix.")”

“He wanted to take Homer Wells in his arms, and hug him, and kiss him, but he could only hope that Homer understood how much Dr. Larch's self-esteem was dependent on his self-control.”

“Dr. Larch bent over him and kissed him, very lightly, on his lips. Homer heard Dr. Larch whisper, ‘Good work, Homer.’ He felt a second, even lighter kiss. ‘Good work, my boy,’ the doctor said, and then left him.Homer Wells felt his tears come silently; there were more tears than he remembered crying the last time he had cried – when Fuzzy Stone had died and Homer had lied about Fuzzy to Snowy Meadows and the others. He cried and cried, but he never made a sound; he would have to change Dr. Larch’s pillowcase in the morning, he cried so much. He cried because he had received his first fatherly kisses.”

“And when Dr. Daruwalla breathed in her dangerous aroma, he thought he'd at last identified the smell of sex, which struck him as an earthy commingling of death and flowers”

“… and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of normal life.”