“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.”

“Men who fear demons see demons everywhere.”

“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innume...”

“I suddenly realized. The zebra. It is not something outside of us. The zebra is something inside of us. Our fears. Our own self-destructive nature. The zebra is the worst part of us when we are fac...”