“Lively, too. Talky as a jaybird. With something smart to say on every subject: better than the radio.”

“It’s better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes.”

“Good luck and believe me, dearest Doc - it's better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear.”

“There is always something wrong with redheads. The hair is kinky, or it's the wrong color, too dark and tough, or too pale and sickly. And the skin - it rejects the elements: wind, sun, everything discolors it. A really beautiful redhead is rarer than a flawless forty-carat pigeon-blood ruby - or a flawed one, for that matter. But none of this was true of Kate. Her hair was like a winter sunset, lighted with the last of the pale afterglow. And the only redhead I've ever seen with a complexion to compare with hers was Pamela Churchill's. But then, Pam is English, she grew up saturated with dewy English mists, something every dermatologist ought to bottle.”

“As long as you live, there's always something waiting; and even if it's bad, and you know it's bad, what can you do? You can't stop living.”

“Every day I woke up saying "If I die....", not realising how dead I was already, and only a memory tagging along with Delores and Pepe... Wherever they were: I grieved for Pepe, not because I'd lost him (yes, that a little), but because in the end I knew Delores would find him, too: it is easy to escape daylight, but night is inevitable, and dreams are the giant cage.”

“Did you ever, in that wonderland wilderness of adolesence [sic] ever, quite unexpectedly, see something, a dusk sky, a wild bird, a landscape, so exquisite terror touched you at the bone? And you are afraid, terribly afraid the smallest movement, a leaf, say, turning in the wind, will shatter all? That is, I think, the way love is, or should be: one lives in beautiful terror.”