"For our part, when we feel, we evaporate; ah, we breatheourselves out and away; with each new heartfirewe give off a fainter scent. True, someone may tell us:you're in my blood, this room, Spring itselfis filled with you . . . To what end? He can't hold us,we vanish within him and around him."

"I can’t take back the past, Nadya. Not even we Unicorns can do that. But I’ll be damned if someone else is going to control our future. I’ve been away for too long, and I will always regret not being there for the Rourakin. But I have returned, and I am not leaving again."

"But the purpose and nature are never clearly revealed. Human behaviour is a series of lunges, of which, it is sometimes sensed, the direction is inevitable."

"One's lifework I have learned grows with the working and the living. Do it as if your life depended on it and first thing you know you'll have made a life out of it. A good life too."

"Most kids don't give a hoot in hell for brains; they go a penny a pound, and the kid with the high I.Q. Who can't play baseball or at least come in third in the local circle jerk is everybody's fifth wheel."

"I have noticed that when people tell their own stories, often it has less to do with wanting to communicate an idea to another than with clarifying an emotion to themselves. Or when the subject of the story is beloved and missing, as a way to make them here and alive."

"She turned off all the lights in the duplex and peered out the windows, moving from one room to the next to see if she could catch sight of the a black sedan. Security lights and streetlights in her complex cast a strange orange glow on the misty snow. It looked like the perfect night for a murder."