“I wanted to tell her that I loved her, and not in the complicated way I loved our parents, but in a simple way I never had to think about. I loved her like breathing.”

“My father gave me a ruined boy to compensate for the fact that he does not love me. The boy is fragile, brokenbroke himselfbroke everything.I asked him why he did it. He said because the world was ...”

“He is broken in three ways, sometimes four. I count them.-He believes himself to be human, but is not actually. At least not anymore. This is similar to the way he believes himself to be alive.-He ...”

“Tender," she said again. "Tender is kind and gentle. It's also sore, like the skin around an injury.”

“I had only to remember that centuries before, men fell in battle for the daughter of Troy, that passions carried greater weight than decorum. It took so little to prove that human life and property...”

“The new mythology of love was that it bent to the fashion of the day, obligated to take the shape of doves, lilies, jewels. This is a lie. Love is sometimes as passionate as war.”

“[T]he relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios--the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have ...”

“Front grace in the shadows”

“People from the past, have a tendency to walk back into the present, and run over the future.”

“I do not love men: I love what devours them.”

“Despite my ghoulish reputation, I really have the heart of a small boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk.”

“Part of his mind was screaming, but it was a distant one and easy to ignore.”

“A name can't begin to encompass the sum of all her parts. But that's the magic of names, isn't it? That the complex, contradictory individuals we are can be called up complete and whole in another ...”

“People often lose their names. Names fall into holes or get eaten by wild animals. Sometimes theyre carried away by the wind.”

“Young man, names are powerful things. You dont just go around using them for no reason.”