“Everyone was a rose but even more complex than a mere flower. Everyone was made up of infinitely layered petals. And everyone had something indescribably precious at the heart of their being.No one was shallow. Not really.”

“Everyone should know what it is like to be called by name. By the name of the unique person one is atheart.”

“He had always felt that he lived on the edges of life, Constantine realized, watching everyone else living, sometimes helping them do it.”

“Did everyone make the most ghastly blunders at regularly intervals through their life and live to regret them ever afterward? Was everyone's life filled with confusing and contradictory mix of guilt and innocence, hatred and love, concern and unconcern, and any number of other pairings of polar opposites? Or were most people one thing or the other - good or bad, cheerful or crotchety, generous or miserly, and so on.”

“But really there was no hurry. It is time to love, he had said downstairs. And time was not always just one second long or even one minute or one hour. Those were artificial divisions, imposed by humankind. Time was infinite. And it was time to love......Even infinity had an end. They had loved. And somehow having loved was quite as beautiful as loving. For of course there was no real end to it. Infinity might have an end, but love did not.”

“Everyone had run to do her bidding. Soon only the three men--the three useless ones--had been left in the sitting room to fight terror and nausea and fits of the vapors.The door opened. Three pale, terrified faces turned toward it.-the three manly men waiting during a childbirth”

“We all learn to bury a broken heart beneath layers of dignity”