"...The way we ended things was not uncommon for kids like us. She said we'd lost enough in our short lives to want to cauterize our wounds before they happened. We burned our connection closed before we felt the holes."

"I don't even know how long she sobs. Time ceases to pass, and she cries, cries, cries. Clutches me and makes these sounds of a soul being ripped in two, the grief so long denied taking its toll. Fermented grief is far more potent."

"And I saw the sax line-up that he had behind him and I thought, I'm going to learn the saxophone. When I grow up, I'm going to play in his band. So I sort of persuaded my dad to get me a kind of a plastic saxophone on the hire purchase plan."

"She had acquired some of his gypsy ways, some of his nonchalance, his bohemian indiscipline. She had swung with him into the disorders of strewn clothes, spilled cigarette ashes, slipping into bed all dressed, falling asleep thus, indolence, timelessness...A region of chaos and moonlight. She liked it there."

"Our life is frittered away by detail...Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let our affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand...Simplify, simplify!"

"For frail but surprisingly strong fairies who had lost their way above groundfor burned mermaids and sick vampire girlsfor wild wolfish women with sharp teeth and leaves in their hair."

"There is no night porter wandering about in King's. The authorities pay you the compliment, ugly gate-crasher, of treating you as a grown-up. And since we are not grown-up you and I, we will perform our midnight frolics as the inmates burn the midnight oil."