“The corpse's hand reached up and grabbed Shaisam by the throat. He gasped, thrashing, as the corpse opened its eye."There's an odd thing about disease I once heard, Fain," Matrim Cauthon whispered. "Once you catch a disease and survive, you can't get it again.”

“You and I are victims of the same disease. We're fighting the same war, just different battles in different theaters, and it's way too late for me to hate you for anything, because we're the same damn thing. My soul, your conscience, whatever's left of me woven into whatever's left of you, all tangled up and conjoined. We're in this together, corpse.”

“Lucky discovered that laughing was like crying in the sense that sometimes you cannot stop. And it's a catching disease, because when another person is spurting and gasping it makes you start again even after you have taken deep gulps of air and stopped looking at the other laughing person.”

“Your father's an asshole. It's not a disease. You don't have to catch it.”

“There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.”

“You act like getting pregnant is a disease you can catch from public toilets.”