“What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star?That, by the way, is a phrase of Julian's. I remember it from a lecture of his on the Iliad, when Patroklos appears t...”

“That surge of power and delight, of confidence, of control. That sudden sense of the richness of the world. Its infinite possibility.”

“But, if I dare say it, it wasn't until I had helped kill a man that I realized how elusive and complex an act a murder can actually be, and not necessarily attributable to one dramatic motive.”

“It seems to me that psychology is only another word for what the ancients called fate.”

“Fate is cruel but maybe not random. Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn't mean we have to bow and gravel to it.”

“Everyone basically has one aria to sing over their entire life.”

“A bracing wind swirls about the boy and alights gently upon his shoulder to gape frightfully at droplets of fate joined infirmly to a sweep of atmospheric and lunar forces far beyond their capabili...”

“It touched me to be trusted with something terrible.”

“The ceilings had set off a ghostly echo, giving all that desperate hilarity the quality of a memory even as I sat listening to it, memories of things I'd never known.”

“Miss Parkinson lived alone in a big bay-windowed house of Edwardian brick with a vast garden of decaying fruit trees and untidy hedges of gigantic size. She was great at making elderberry wine and ...”

“The child was slender as fleeting hope.”

“They passed, leaving a trail of foxfire shuffled up out of the wet leaves like stars plowed in a ship's wake.”

“But, if I dare say it, it wasn't until I had helped kill a man that I realized how elusive and complex an act a murder can actually be, and not necessarily attributable to one dramatic motive.”

“Richard Papen: As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, gutteral verbs, and the world "postmodernist.”

“What do you think about America?""Everyone always smiles so big! Wellmost people. Maybe not so much you. I think it looks stupid.”