“Everyone had a story of grief. Everyone else's was worse than yours.”

“Things happen. To everyone. No one escapes.”

“For I knew already that something had taken me from me, and had replaced it with a desperate longing for a time before; a time before fear; a time before shame. And now that knowledge had a voice that rose from the depths of my years and howled into the night sky like a wounded animal longing for home.”

“He started to do that, started to inform me of everything; the inconsequential, the meaningful; conversations that ended in a cul-de-sac of unanswerable rhetoric. i think it was because I knew everything about him, had read it all - the beautiful, the sordid, the all of his book. I had been his editor for 5 years, and now it seemed, had become his editor away from the printed page.”

“I am here but I am not yours.”

“It was left to Nancy and me to pick up the pieces that my brother had become; to resurrect his shrunken spirit and pull his pale tear-stained face from beneath his pillow and give sense to a world that had given him none; he loved, yet he wasn't loved back.”

“And from that moment, I watched her. Watched her with different coloured eyes, until the raging energy that coursed through my body finally revealed itself and gave itself a name: envy. For I knew already that something had taken me from me, and had replaced itself with a desperate longing for a time before; a time before fear, a time before shame. And now that knowledge had a voice, and it was a voice that rose from the depths of my years and howled into the night sky like a wounded animal longing for home.”