“I do not mean to mock or ridicule your life's work, for in one way at least it mimics my own: We have dedicated our lives to the pursuit of phantoms. The difference is the nature of those phantoms. Mine exist between other men's ears; yours live solely between your own.”

“What of men? I can't think of anything more banal. I have no doubt — no doubt whatsoever — that once it has obtained the means to do so, the species will wipe itself off the face of the earth. There is no mystery to it; it is our nature. Oh, one might delve into the particulars, but really, what can we say about the species that invented murder? What can we say?”

“Perhaps that is our doom, our human curse, to never really know one another. We erect edifices in our minds about the flimsy framework of word and deed, mere totems of the true person, who, like the gods to whom the temples were built, remains hidden. We understand our own construct; we know our own theory; we love our own fabrication. Still . . . does the artifice of our affection make our love any less real?”

“Between the sleeping and the waking, it is there. Between the rising and the resting, it is there.It is always there. It gnaws on my heart. It chews on my soul.I turn aside and see it. I stop my ears and hear it. I cover myself and feel it.There are no human words for what I mean.It is the language of the bare bough and the cold stone, pronounced in the fell wind's sullen whisper and the metronomic drip-drip of the rain. It is the song the falling snow sings and the discordant clamour of sunlight ripped apart by the canopy and miserly filtered down.It is what the unseeing eye sees. It is what the deaf ear heres.It is the romantic ballad of death's embrace; the solemn hymn of offal dripping from bloody teeth; the lamentation of the bloated corpse rotting in the sun; the graceful ballet of maggots twisting in the ruins of God's temple.Here in this gray land, we have no name. We are the carcasses reflected in the yellow eye.Our bones are bleached within our skin; our empty sockets regard the crow.Here in this shadow country, our tiny voices scratch like a fly's wing against unmoving air.Ours is the language of imbeciles, the gibberish of idiots. The root and the vine have more to say than us.”

“It is a dark and dirty business, Will Henry. And you are well on your way." He patted my knee, not to congratulate, I think, but to console. His tone was sad and bitter. "You are well on your way.”

“Afterward I told his widow, "Your husband is dead, but at least he died laughing.' I think she took some comfort in that. It is the second-best way to die, Will Henry." He did not say what the best way was.”

“There are those who labor in the darkness, that the rest of us might live in the light.”