“Nicholas Temelcoff is famous on the bridge, a daredevil. He is given all the difficult jobs and he takes them. He descends into the air with no fear. He is a solitary. He assembles ropes, brushes the tackle and pulley at his waist, and falls off the bridge like a diver over the edge of a boat.”

“Man is something that shall be overcome. Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman — a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.”

“He who cannot forgive breaks the bridge over which he himself must pass.”

“He stepped off the pavement like a man jumping off a bridge, as calm as a swimmer with an ocean out below. Lucy had known what he was going to do the instant their eyes met. She'd know what he intended because she would have done the very same thing if she'd had his courage. Nothing was going to break his fall.”

“What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an over-going and a down-going.”

“Illium seems far too pretty to be dangerous.” Dmitri’s male beauty, by contrast, was a darker, edgier thing.“No one ever expects him to take out a blade and slice off their balls,” he said with lethal amusement in his tone as he drove them toward the GeorgeWashington Bridge. “He does it with such grace, too.”