“The only really frightening thing about Cinnamon Hill belongs in the realm of the living and serves to remind me that some of them-just a few of them, a tiny minority-are much more dangerous than all the dead put together.”

“Nobody ever feels just one way about another person, Margo. We're so much more complicated than that. I can see a million things you want from me, just like the million things I want from you. Some of them are wonderful. Some are awful. Some contradict each other, and some don't make sense at all. But none of those things matter, not really. What matters is what you do about them.”

“But some of the greatest achievements in philosophy could only be compared with taking up some books which seemed to belong together, and putting them on different shelves; nothing more being final about their positions than that they no longer lie side by side. The onlooker who doesn’t know the difficulty of the task might well think in such a case that nothing at all had been achieved.”

“One thing about change hasn't changed: it still fascinates some people, frightens others, and provides a good living for a prophetic minority.”

“Nothing is more difficult than to understand the dead, I've found; but nothing is more dangerous than to ignore them.”

“Yet the story of Orpheus, it occurs to me, is not just about the desire of the living to resuscitate the dead but about the ways in which the dead drag us along into their shadowy realm because we cannot let them go. So we follow them into the Underworld, descending, descending, until one day we turn and make our way back.”