“How seldom we recognize the sound when the bolt of our fate slides home.”

“You know how cats do. They hide to die. Dogs come home.”

“There is a common emotion we all recognize and have not yet named—the happy anticipation of being able to feel contempt.”

“… It is not healing to see your childhood home, but it helps you measure whether you are broken, and how and why, assuming you want to know.”

“Just before nightfall, Hannibal approached Lecter castle through the woods. As he looked at his home, his feelings remained curiously flat; it is not healing to see your childhood home, but it helps you measure whether you are broken, and how and why, assuming you want to know.”

“We routinely leave our small children in day care among strangers. At the same time, in our guilt we evince paranoia about strangers and foster fear in children.”

“We rarely get to prepare ourselves in meadows or on graveled walks; we do it on short notice in places without windows, hospital corridors, rooms like this lounge with its cracked plastic sofa and Cinzano ashtrays, where the cafe curtains cover blank concrete. In rooms like this, with so little time, we prepare our gestures, get them by heart so we can do them when we're frightened in the face of Doom.”