“it was the insoluble problems—the false leads and the cold cases—that reflected the true nature of things.”

“The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.”

“This was the writer's true doppelgänger, I thought; not some invisible imp of the perverse who watched you from the shadows, periodically appearing, dressed in your clothes and carrying your house keys, to set fire to your life; but rather the typical protagonist of your work -- Roderick Usher, Eric Waldensee, Francis Macomber, Dick Diver -- whose narratives at first reflected but in time came to determine your life's very course.”

“...it had bred false camaraderies and drawn my attention to deep flaws and fault lines when what mattered--what matters so often in the course of everyday human life--were the surfaces and the joins. ”

“But the boy had a gift. And it was in the nature of a gift that it be endlessly given. ”

“It's simply the case that as I get older, I seem every day to give a little bit less of a fuck what people think of or say about me.”

“The natural fragrance of her body was a spicy, angry smell like that of fresh pencil shavings.”