“As if the night had said to me, You are the night and the night alone understands you and enfolds you in its arms One with the shadows. Without nightmare. An inexplicable peace.”

“A summer rain had left the night clean and sparkling with drops of water. I leaned against the end pillar of the gallery, my head touching the soft tendrils of a jasmine which grew there in a const...”

“It seems an insult to the night to speak of purpose and intent, when this common moment is so brimming full of blessed design tranquility. All things follow their course.”

“It was as if when I looked into his eyes I was standing alone on the edge of the world...on a windswept ocean beach. There was nothing but the soft roar of the waves.”

“What is fear after all? It is indecision. You seek some way to resist, escape. There is none.”

“If you really want peace in any world you have to learn to say nothing.”

“The smell of jasmine makes people tell their secrets”

“I should like to understand more about the signs on the shirt you wore earlier. What was it: Eat the tail and suck the head?”

“Could you just imagine? If every suicide rose--think of Faulkner's Quentin Compson as a vampire. I don't hate the South I don't I don't. She wondered how they'd have worked it out in Cambridge when...”

“My first thought was that a tornado had somehow picked me up and carried me off, like in the Wizard of Oz. No old witches pedaled by, and I didn't see any flying farm animals or chicken coops, and ...”

“Did you just mentally pistol whip that guy, with his own gun? Nice, Amber. I would have just killed him.”

“Getting up from the bed, Dominick approaches me at a slow predatory pace. Once again, I cannot move my feet.”

“Goddamn it, do it yourself. Youre five hundred years old and you cant use a telephone? Read the directions. What are you, an immortal idiot?”