“The gaja might despise the Romany, but no Rom ever forgot his dead. For him, roaming over the earth were not only the half million Gypsies who drew breath but also the countless Gypsies who had gone before, restless spirits still wandering through cities and deserts, still real.”

“Madame Olga began muttering something under her breath in gypsy to the effect of "Fucking debutantes, they do not understand the sacredness of the moment." But everyone in the room just thought this was part of her gypsy spirit chant.”

“There was the biography of a Norwegian resistance fighter who swam through chilly oceans and got gangrene and wandered through I think it might have been Finland or Lapland in a sweet short summer and everyone took him in and the dark Finnish women made him tea with honey in it on late afternoons and it was beautiful but also horribly sad because the book was only half over and you knew that bad things were going to happen.”

“The night has a thousand eyes and I'm a gypsy dancer still hungry for more.”

“The gypsies were a special breed. It wasn't blood that flowed through their veins but rhythm.”

“He could hear trhe voices, the whispers, the sighs, of these souls who were unable to let go of their burdens. ... Pi understood this need to hold on. To let let go of his pain. It had become such a part of him. Who would he be without it? The thought frightened him. So he wandered the halls of the catacombs like the other souls who were half-dead and half-alive.”