“You'd better pray your ass off before you climb in bed tonight. You better pray the Lord finds you some other line of business, cuz the folks you're working for right now is goddamn devils. Swindli...”

“He started to wonder if maybe they had been raptured while he was in school. He always worried the Lord would show up when he wasn't around. Or when he was on the toilet, taking care of a number two.”

“The house gulped in a big breath of fresh air, like some frantic drowning thing breaking the water's surface and gasping for life. It had sat unopened for so long, suffocating in the silence, it's ...”

“She had developed a number of habits in her younger years, none of which carried with them a bright future, and the things she would offer to do for a couple of dollars would make the Devil blush.”

“Disobey God and you are forgiven. Disobey Nature and you get disease.”

“Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a sid...”

“Cancer. The word meant the same to me as tsunami or piranha. I had never seen them; I wasn't even quite sure what they were, but I knew they were bad and I knew in many cases they were deadly.”

“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?”

“Mother Nature is relentless and forward. When we do not live according to her laws she rewards us with disease.”

“In examining disease, we gain wisdom about anatomy and physiology and biology. In examining the person with disease, we gain wisdom about life.”

“They are very good odds. And I know that my scientific brain believes them, if not my panic-ridden, maternal one. Those odds should have made a difference to my reaction. I should have been able to...”