“Inhale and hold the evening in your lungs.”

“But the weight of her anguish over Gregory – this one missing airman, this unreliable, perhaps unworthy man – filled her whole upper half, diaphragm, lungs, ribs, shoulders, with such crushing gravity that the sighs with which she was obliged to displace it shook her entire body.”

“You put your time where your priority is.”

“He saw a picture in his mind of a terrible piling up of the dead. It came from his contemplation of the church, but it had its own clarity: the row on row, the deep rotting earth hollowed out to hold them, while the efforts of the living, with all their works and wars and great buildings, were no more than the beat of a wing against the weight of time.”

“The more you're challenged, the more rigidly you assert your beliefs. You have nothing to lose because without your beliefs you're nothing anyway: they make you what you are. It's shit or bust.”

“No, I want to take you out back and beat your fucking head on the floor.”

“I know. I was there. I saw the great void in your soul, and you saw mine.”