“Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.”

“Luck's the word those with poor hearts use for ka...”

“Speech destroys the function of love, I think-that's a hell of a thing for a writer to say, I guess, but I believe it to be true. If you speak to tell a deer you mean it no harm, it glides away with a single flip of its tail. Love has teeth; they bite; the wounds never close. No word, no combination of words can close those love bites. it's the other way around, that's the joke. If those wounds dry up, the words die with them.”

“Mostly I was just plain freaked. Not mentally tottering, I think a human mind that's moderately well-adjusted can absorb a lot of strangeness before it actually totters, but freaked, yes.”

“They say suicides and murderers go to Hell. If so, I will know my way around, because I've been there for the last eight years.”

“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”

“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.”