“A lack of desire is something I've never experienced. I'd have to be on my deathbed before I stopped wanting—no, never mind, I was on my deathbed in the not-too-distant past, and even then I had the devil's own itch for my wife."-Sebastian, Lord St. Vincent”

“It was a nice compromise, something I'd never experienced before in my life. With Cooter I did the compromising, I didnt know what it was like to have a fair dose of what I wanted before I gave in to what someone else wanted.”

“It’s impossible,” he snapped. “Why?” “Because I’m Sebastian, Lord St. Vincent. I can’t be celibate. Everyone knows that.”

“My beautiful boy, my lover, my friend. The man I thought I'd never see again. Sebastian.”

“There are words in my life that I wish I'd never said. I wish I'd never told my wife that I loved her, because then I had to line up all my actions with those words. I had to always act like that was true. And those three words, I love you, should never be used if you don't mean them. My lying has meant I will never get to use them on anyone else. I went against my own truth, my own heart, and there is really no coming back from that.”

“When my father-in-law, Jan Vuijst, a Dutch Reformed minister, was on his deathbed, I had a deeply intimate conversation with him - as it turned out, my last conversation with him. He said to me, 'It was a privilege to have lived.' The soulful gratitude of that simple statement will never leave me.”