“An honorable defeat is better than a dishonorable victory.”

“Sometimes it's better to live without a mother than not to live at all.”

“... I'll tell her about Tia. I'll tell her how beautiful she was and how brave. And I'll tell her the most important thing of all: that her mother loved her better than her life.”

“I would rather risk failure than achieve it without risk.”

“It is easier to act yourself into a new way of thinking, than it is to think yourself into a new way of acting.”

“(Mason) took a swig of his drink and shuddered. 'Whoa - little too strong there bartender.' He scrunched his face. 'Oh shit, I am the bartender.”

“She wrote poetry constantly; that was her "work". She was a slow bleeder and she slaved over it for long, exhausting hours, and many a middle of a night I could hear her creaking around the dead house with a pen in one hand, a clipboard and a flashlight in the other, refining her poems, jotting down the lines of a conceit. Writing never came easy for her; it gave her calluses. She never courted the muses, she wrestled them, mauled them all over the house and came up, after weeks of peripatetic labor, with a slim Spencerian sonnet, fourteen lines of imagistic jabberwocky.”