“How easy it was to capitalize on a persons own bent for self-destruction; how simple to nudge them into non-being, then to stand back and shrug and agree that it had been the inevitable result of a...”

“How could the death of someone you had never met affect you so?”

“Couples tended to be of roughly equivalent personal attractiveness, though of course factors such as money often seemed to secure a partner of significantly better looks than oneself.”

“She wuz depressed. Yeah, she wuz on stuff for it. Like me. Sometimes it jus' takes you over. It's an illness," she said, although she made the words sound like "it's uh nill”

“It's an illness," she said, although she made the words sound like "it's uh nillness." Nillness, thought Strike, for a second distracted. Sometimes illness turned slowly to nillness, as was happeni...”

“Hers was the kind of family that commissioned painters to immortalize its young: a background utterly alien to Strike, and one he had come to know like a dangerous foreign country.”

“But suppose the endlessly dead were to wake in us some emblem:they might point to the catkins hangingfrom the empty hazel trees, or direct us to the raindescending on black earth in early spring. ...”

“Life is but a dream for the dead.”

“Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.”

“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?”