“Adele was in everybody’s wish list, and her list of Romeos was nearly as long as the Yellow Pages. Some witty person had suggested that her family needed a system of traffic lights to avoid fatal crashes for the men in her life.”

“Adelina knew perfectly well who the father was, but she worked hard to forget it, and by the end of her life she would insist that Jesús was her child and hers only.”

“Doña Remedios, like her husband, was quite traditional and not trendy enough to understand concepts like natural birth or the importance of a friendly environment for the newborn. Birth might be natural, but she didn’t think it should be a pain for the mother or an inconvenience for the mother’s family. How friendly can it be for a baby to be born to her mother’s screaming her head off and everybody running around like lunatics?”

“I thought part of the idea of having therapy was putting one in touch with his or her feelings. And don’t give me all that about transference, and counter-transference and all that. I know what I feel. And it has nothing to do with all that. And you also feel for me. And if you don’t know that, then maybe it’s you who needs to have therapy to gain a better knowledge of yourself.”

“Matthews asked:“How intimate was your relationship with Dr. Miller?”“Intimate?” Phil still couldn’t grasp what they were asking.“My colleague is asking if you’d ever had sex with Dr. Miller before that evening.” Jones added curtly. “I’ve never…We’ve never…We’re friends. We’d never had sex before that evening, and we didn’t have sex that evening either.”“How do you explain your semen in her sheets then, Mr. Marshall?”

“His eyes, green with yellow sparks, and with elongated pupils like a cat’s, made his grandmother gasp and say: ‘Jesus! He has the devil’s eyes!”

“It’s…The only way I can get on with my life is by forgetting what went on before. Dave used to tell me that I didn’t have control over what the bastard of my father did to me, and that he’d been punished for it, and I might as well concentrate on the rest of my life, because over that…I had some control and I could decide what to do. I could change it over; I could become anything I wanted if I just tried hard enough.”