“She ran out of her marriage the way a woman can run out of a pair of sandals when she decides to let go and really dash.”

“If I kept saying it; if I kept reaching out. My accident really taught me just one thing: the only way to go on is to go on. To say 'I can do this' even when you know you can't.”

“the year she had run fleetly through the dewy grass under the moon- the night of wine, when dreams condensed out of thin air like the nightmilk of fantasy.”

“In the end it was Tabby who cast the deciding vote, as she so often has at crucial moments in my life. I'd like to think I've done the same for her from time to time, because it seems to me that one of the things marriage is about is casting the tiebreaking vote when you just can't decide what you should do next.”

“And when she talks of Carrie White her face takes on an odd pinched look that is more like Lovecraft out of Arkham than Kerouac out of Southern Cal.”

“She dreamed of going into the dining room and finding a woman bound with chains to the long Ethan Allen table there. The woman was naked except for a black leather hood that covered the top half of her face. I don’t know that woman, that woman is a stranger to me, she thought in her dream, and then from beneath the hood Petra said: ‘Mama, is that you?”

“It'll be your damnation, boy. You'll wear out a hundred pairs of boots on your way to hell.”