“The two officers seemed more puzzled by Emily's costume than by the presence of a corpse in the Mercedes. Perhaps corpses were more regular.”

“Nothing makes a man feel more heroic than lying on the floor while his wife captures a criminal with a poinsettia”

“As he came up Second Avenue, Henry saw that Jerry Lauterbach was again having trouble with the neighborhood psycho. It was natural, Henry reflected, that New York, being so well supplied with all the necessities of life, should not be lacking in persons whose mental furniture was sliding on the polished floors of their intelligence.”

“One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope.In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive?”

“Anyway, maybe there weren't any solutions. Human society, corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-term pain.”

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

“More powerful than God, more evil than the Devil; the poor have it, the rich lack it, and if you eat it you die?”