“The house in which the fourteen sisters of Emilio Montez O'brien lived, radiated femininity.”

“On his back, Robert must have had time to see something beautiful, and not just the ugliness of a city street at the end of life. Even with the tremendous pain in his badly gutted belly he would have looked up beyond the fire escapes and the windows with their glittery trees and television glows, to the sky about the rooftops. A sky shimmery with the possibilities of the death; lights exaggerated, the heavens peeled back- a swirling haze of nebulae and comets - in some distant place, intimations of the new beginning into which he would soon journey”

“Glorious life ending. There must have been a moment when his son had gasped for air, the last time, as Jesus must. But as Jesus had risen, he wanted his son to rise up, organs and spirit and mind intact, and everything to be as it had been not so long ago.”

“Oh yes!...The sweet summons of God to man. That's when He calls you up to His arms. And it's the most beautiful thing, a rebirth, a new life. But, just the same I'm in no rush to find out.”

“Rugged and straightforward as he was, there was something in his nature that was purely feminine in its tenderness”

“Do you think that I would not have let you know that, if you suffered, I was suffering too: that if you wept there were tears in my eyes also: and that if you lay in the house of bondage and were despised of men, I out of my griefs had built a house in which to dwell until your coming, a treasury in which all that man had denied to you would be laid up for your healing, one hundredfold in increase?”

“My Salome is a mystic the sister of Salammbô a Saint Thérèse who worships the moon.”