“And many a day's hours were like that. As if someone fashioned my likeness somewherein order to torment it slowly with needles.I felt each sharp prick of his playing,and it was: as if a rain fell on mein which all things change.”

“I knew my words were harsh, as I enunciated each syllable slowly, but I felt like I had to be clear with him. We’d crossed too many lines that day, and it needed to stop.”

“...It felt like they were telling each other secrets. Everything they said felt like that—whispered, tender, full of other meanings, like when you tell someone a dream or talk about your astrological signs as code for all the things you love about each other.”

“Rain fell on the roofs of the just and the unjust, the saints and the sinners, those who knew peace and those in torment, and tomorrow began at a dark hour.”

“To judge from the entrance the dawn was making, it promised to be a very iffy day -- that is, blasts of angry sunlight one minute, fits of freezing rain the next, all of it seasoned with sudden gusts of wind -- one of those days when someone who is sensitive to abrupt shifts in weather and suffers them in his blood and brain is likely to change opinion and direction continuously, like those sheets of tin, cut in the shape of banners and roosters, that spin every which way on rooftops with each new puff of wind. ”

“On good days I felt like a chrysalis from which a butterfly had emerged, and on bad days I felt like a chewing-gum wrapper someone had thrown in the hedges.”