“It is exceedingly odd to see a piece of yourself apart from yourself.”

“A word of advice, Will Henry. When a person of the female gender says she wants to show you something, run the other way. The odds are it is not something you wish to see.”

“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.”

“I assure you, Constable Morgan, I am quite sane, as I understand the word, perhaps the sanest person in this room, for I suffer from no illusions. I have freed myself, you see, from the pretense that burdens most men. Much like our prey, I do not impose order where there is none; I do not pretend there is any more than what there is, or that you and I are anything more than what we are. That is the essence of their beauty, Morgan, the aboriginal purity of their being, and why I admire them.”

“You could see the smile coming a year before it arrived.”

“Miss Marks, you see, makes her living by...entertaining young, and not so young, sailors...or any other members of the armed forced, or civilians, who enjoy...being entertained by ladies who...entertain.”

“Death had brought an end to their misery. Would nothing but a visitation from that same dark angel bring and end to mine?”