"When ill, the patient assumes what Parsons called 'the sick-role'. Accordingly, the sick person is, on the one hand, excused his or her social responsabilites, but, on the other hand, is expected to desire a return to health and to comply unquestioningly with the directives of medical experts in order to achieve this goal."

"Perfection is a paradigm meant to keep us striving and learning and growing. Like a wondrous sunset, perfection may be beyond our reach, but it is within our view and well worth seeking after."

"Otherwise the silence in the room was profound, the silence of places Brian had not yet been: gazing at the lifeless body of a beloved, the echo of a lost illusion, the tinnitus of betrayal."

"What saddens me most is that some poor woman out there has to be Garth's wife. And his three children -- oh, his poor three children. What a despicable human being this guy is."

"Intuition is really a sudden immersion of the soul into the universal current of life, where the histories of all people are connected, and we are all able to know everything, because it's all written there."

"His eyes go wide while a gasp of wonder passes his lips. He turns his body fully toward us. His lips moving like a fish out of water, gasping for breath. He gives his head a shake and stutters out, “Mer—mermaids. There are fish with women’s bodies or—women with fish bodies sitting upon the rocks. I—I never knew..."

"For the average person leading an ordinary life, fame holds an hypnotic attraction. Many would sooner perish than exist in anonymity. But for the unlucky few who've had notoriety forced upon them, infamy can be a sentence more damning than any prison term."

"I’ve lost control of the simple act of being able to breathe. I’m hyperventilating. “I don’t need you to show me how to breathe,” I say. “You don’t?” He looks skeptical. “I think I can handle the simple act of breathing without you."

"Only a few short years ago, the average stay-at-home mom spent her relaxation time reading Jackie Collins and staring at the pool boy. Now, half of them are outselling Jackie Collins writing porn about the pool boy.The other half are writing reviews of."

"But I have made a study of Shadowhunters now, over the past century, and let me tell you that we are more human than most human beings. When our hearts break, they break into shards that cannot be easily fit back together. I envy mundanes their resilience sometimes."