“I have to tell you it was the first time even after all these years of expecting my own death that i truly knew what it meant to die because with you gone there was nothing left for me to live for.”

“Small things such as this have saved me: how much I love my mother—even after all these years. How powerfully I carry her within me. My grief is tremendous but my love is bigger. So is yours. You are not grieving your son’s death because his death was ugly and unfair. You’re grieving it because you loved him truly. The beauty in that is greater than the bitterness of his death.”

“How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or do""Except to teach me for the first time what they meant.”

“I wanted love and goodness in this which is living death,' I said. 'It was impossible from the beginning, because you cannot have love and goodness when you do what you know to be evil, what you know to be wrong. You can only have the desperate confusion and longing and the chasing of phantom goodness in its human form. I knew the real answer to my quest before I ever reached Paris. I knew it when I first took a human life to feed my craving. It was my death. And yet I would not accept it, could not accept it, because like all creatures I don't wish to die! And so I sought for other vampires, for God, for the devil, for a hundred things under a hundred names. And it was all the same, all evil. And all wrong. Because no one could in any guise convince me of what I myself knew to be ture, that I was damned in my own mind and soul.”

“God. No wonder it was so easy. He’s been bleeding since he was a baby. He just never told anyone. How do you even know it hurts after all that time?” Because you loved me, and I knew what it meant to feel.”

“It was the first time I had ever seen someone die, and it wasn't what I expected...I stood there waiting for something momentous to happen, for someone to say something profound, but there was nothing...I still had the childish notion that since my life was so important, all lives were so important. Since my death would be so cataclysmic, all deaths would be so cataclysmic.”