“Behind the sullen girl sat Denis Cooverman, sweating: along the cap of his mortarboard, trickling behind his ears and rippling down his forehead; around his nostrils and in that groove below his nose (which Denis would be quick to identify as the philtrum...); from his palms, behind his knees, inside his elbows, between his toes and from many locations not typically associated with perpiratory activity; squirting out his nipples, spewing from his navel, coursing between his buttocks and forming a tiny lake that gently lapped at his genitals; from under his arms, naturally, in two varietals--hot and sticky,a nd cold and terrified.”

“I'm sorry I'm so pathetic," he thought, and then realized he had also said it.Beth laughed, so lightly and so kindly that Denis felt it in his chest, not his stomach.Can I tell you a secret?"Yes, tell me all your secrets Denis kept to himself.Beth leaned in, whispered: "All boys are pathetic.”

“J!m squinted his first hate of the day.”

“...Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature.”

“I want to study the secrets tucked between his elbows and the whispers caught behind his knees. I want to follow the lines of his silhouette with my eyes and the tips of my fingers. I want to trace rivers and valleys along the curved muscles of his body.”

“Kirpal’s left hand swoops down and catches the dropped fork an inch from the floor and gently passes it into the fingers of his daughter, a wrinkle at the edge of his eyes behind his spectacles.”

“A mouse slid out from under his hat and scrambled down his sleeve, across his lap, and down to the floor.Nothing,' said Fenworth, 'should distract from a wizard's dignity.”