“It's not sipping wine. It's a mourning wine. You drain it. Like this.”

“Never a possession, always the possessor, with skin as pale as smoke, and eyes tawny and sharp as yellow wine: Desire is everything you've ever wanted. Whoever you are. Whatever you are. Everything.”

“There are three things, and three things only, that can lift the pain of mortality and ease the ravages of life. These are wine, women and song.”

“His beard was all colors, a grove of trees in autumn, deep brown and fire-orange and wine-red, an untrimmed tangle across the lower half of his face. His cheeks were apple-red. He looked like a friend; like someone you had known all your life.”

“The tongue is the most remarkable. For we use it both to taste out sweet wine and bitter poison, thus also do we utter words both sweet and sour with the same tongue.”

“Yes. We both have a bad feeling. Tonight we shall take our bad feelings and share them, and face them. We shall mourn. We shall drain the bitter dregs of mortality. Pain shared, my brother, is pain not doubled, but halved. No man is an island.”

“It's harder to pick and choose when you're dead. It's like a photograph, you know. It doesn't matter as much.”