“There are those nights wehn you're pushing thirty and life seems over. When you feel like you'll never tie up any ends and no one iwll ever kiss your lips again.”

“The human route to sympathy or empathy is a clumsy one but it's all we've got. To understand the consequences of our actions we must exercise our imaginations.”

“All stories are love stories.”

“Loss is like a shrapnel wound, I said, where the piece of metal's got stuck in a place where the surgeons daren't go, so they decide to leave it. It is painful at first, horribly painful, so that you wonder you can live with it. But then the body grows around it, until it doesn't hurt anymore. Not like it used to be. But every now and again there are these twinges when you are not ready for them, and you realize it is still there, and it's always going to be there. It is a part of you. A still, hard point inside.”

“You know the difference between right and wrong,' he repeated finally. 'Man, why did you need Initiation—by the Golden Dawn, or by anybody else? You are a genius, a sage, a giant among men. You have solved the problem which philosophers have been debating since antiquity—the mystery about which no two nations or tribes have ever agreed, and no two men or women have ever agreed, and no intelligent person has ever agreed totally with himself from one day to the next. You know the difference between right and wrong. I am overawed. I swoon. I figuratively kiss your feet.”

“The normal is that which nobody quite is. If you listen to seemingly dull people very closely, you'll see that they're all mad in different and interesting ways, and are merely struggling to hide it.”

“Her tongue was in his mouth, and oh, Jesus, God, she tasted good. Like coffee and brandy and woman. Any thought of resistance fled.She kissed him endlessly, again and again and again, like she was starving. Like she might never get enough. Like she could eat him alive. It was the sexiest thing he’d ever known.”