“In lower Manhattan there is an improbable point where Waverly Place intersects Waverly Place. It was there that I met Veronica, on a snowy, windy night.”

“They were different colors: the right one blue, the left green. And her face in the light of the candle on the table startled me at first, just as it had in the icy night air. After seeing it on the street, I was afraid I had only imagined it: a still, luminous face with a silvery sheen. Finely hewn, with a long, straight nose and a wide mouth, it was nearly identical to another face, which I had photographed years before. Not on a person, bu on the fragment of a frieze I found in some ruins near Verona, The frieze, which depicted a band of musicians, had once been shadowed beneath a cornice high on the temple of Mercury, god of magic. Belonging to one of the musicians, it was a riveting face - like a puzzle that could not be solved - which I had never found, or expected to find, on a living woman.”

“We were on Barrow Street now."Who is the man with the scar?" I said.She shot me a glance, and her face hardened. "You saw him?""How could I miss? He was the real center of attention. Didn't you go to the opening at all?""No" She said. "And just because you saw him doesn't mean he was there.”

“We’d met at a carefree time, a moment full of promise, in its place now were the harsh lessons of the real world.”

“I can only give you some hints. You have to place him in a situation where your advantages are magnified.”

“Love: the sickest of Irony’s sick jokes. The place where logic and order go to die.”

“Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed In one self place, for where we are is hell, And where hell is must we ever be.”