“In practicing the art of confusion, there is no better weapon than poetry.”

“My father was right: people are always leaving. They fall in and out of your life like shadows.”

“I felt as if the world I lived in was only a facade - that beneath its skin, a darker world raged and rampaged. I'd glimpsed that world before, but I'd never known how vast and malignant it might be.”

“He said that academia reminded him of a badly run circus. The faculty members were like underfed animals -- weary of their cages, which were never large enough to begin with -- and they responded sluggishly to the whip. The trapeze artists fell with monotonous regularity into poorly strung nets. The clowns looked hungry. The tent leaked. The crowd was inattentive, shouting incoherently at inappropriate moments. And when the show was over, no one cheered.”

“She looked at me for a second and said, "Oh, never mind. I guess it's true what Mom said? That you've led a sheltered life?"I said I thought the description fairly apt.”

“She especially liked my bedside lamp, which had a five-sided porcelain shade. Unlit, the shade seemed like bumpy ivory. Lit, each panel came to life with the image of a bird: a blue jay, a cardinal, wrens, an oriole, and a dove. Kathleen turned it off and on again, several times. "How does it do that?""The panels are called lithophanes." I knew because I'd asked my father about the lamp, years ago. "The porcelain is carved and painted. You can see it if you look inside the shade.""No," she said. "It's magic. I don't want to know how it's done.”

“Who chose burial monuments? Were the wishes of the deceased taken into consideration? It was a subject I'd never considered before.”