“Put a thief among honest men and they will eventually relieve him of his watch.”

“Characters should be interchangeable as between one book and another. The entire corpus of existing literature should be regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their character...”

“With these words there came the rending scream of a shattered stirk and an angry troubling of the branches as the poor madman percolated through the sieve of a sharp yew, a wailing black meteor hur...”

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of wi...”

“My dear,Find what you love and let it kill you.Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness.Let it kill you and let it devour your remains....”

“If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn't be filled?”

“July 24, 6:03 A.M.The laundry was warm and the rafters were firm, and Michael Holzapfel jumped from the chair as if it were a cliff...Michael Holzapfel knew what he was doing. He killed himself for...”

“A book is a suicide postponed.”

“How much can you really trust the promise of a suicidal father?”