“To begin with, I had never done any good deeds; besides, even if I had simply fabricated a few, I would not have enjoyed going on about them.”

“I was terrified as only grown men and women can be when they wake up in the middle of the night and begin to realise, in the absolute silence and solitude all around them, that it is not only their dream that has woken them, that it is their whole way of life.”

“Finally, when all was said and done, the certainty (so often experienced, yet always new) that female charms, the kind that inflame the senses, are no more than kitchen smells: they tease you when you're hungry and disgust you when you've had your fill.”

“Boulevards are like people: similar in their youth, they undergo gradual change according to what ferments in them.”

“And if all womankind banded together and took the male path, the world would turn into one huge brothel.”

“I had stay alive, and if that meant pretending that I had knowledge of my ex-boyfriend’s whereabouts that would likely lead to his death, then so be it. This was the closest I had gotten to finding Alex, and I wasn’t going to let go of this last shred of immortal in my life. Because if I did, I would likely convince myself that it was too good to be true; that it had only been a dream gone awry; and that the last three months were just a figment of my imagination.”

“People were always sorry. Sorry they had done what they had done, sorry they were doing what they were doing, sorry they were going to do what they were going to do; but they still did whatever it is. The sorrow never stopped them; it just made them feel better. And so the sorrow never stopped.”