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'"Humans are just so novel, fragile, and clever!"'

'"So you're willing to take the group's wisdom, but do nothing for us in return?"'

'"The fear of loss...it can destroy you as much as the loss itself."'

'"We are allowed to make mistakes, to figure out who we wish to be."'

'Revealing her plans, explaining herself...It would take some getting used to.'

'Fear made me work hard, get better. It's a dirty fuel, but it works.'

'Propriety is correct. Justice is just. There's an inescapable transactional quality: perform x good, receive y reward. Grace doesn't work that way. It begins with the reward. Goodness never enters the equation.'

'He studied her eyes. They were deep black but flashed with a brightness, like they held tiny fish that turned to catch the light on their scales. An incitement.'

'Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing anything good. That's the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing.'

'"What's the trick, then?" he asked. "The trick to being at peace at the end?" Orkideh laughed. "If I knew, do you think I'd tell you?"'

'I didn't know what any of it meant, but I knew it meant intensely.'

'Roya knew she would never be able to be the sort of mother her own mother had been, the kind who quivered with love like a wet branch.'

'"Heaven be praised," I said, "we need not whip this prose into poetry."'

'"Look at life through this, look at life through that; let there be rose leaves, let there be vine leaves – I covered the whole street, Oxford Street, Piccadilly Circus, with the blaze and ripple of my mind, with vine leaves and rose leaves."'

'"Trembling with ardour, I pretended that I was not surprised."'

'"And then not to talk. To follow the dark paths of the mind and enter the past, to visit books, to brush aside their branches and break off some fruit."'

'"There are then warm hollows grooved in the heart of the uproar; alcoves of silence where we can shelter under the wing of beauty from truth which I desire."'

'"She dreads us, she despises us, yet comes cringing to our sides because for all our cruelty there is always some name, some face, which sheds a radiance, which lights up her pavements and makes it possible for her to replenish her dreams."'

'"Pools lie on the other side of the world reflecting marble columns. The swallow dips her wing in dark pools."'

'"Let me then create you. (You have done as much for me.)"'

'"(the rhythm is the main thing in writing)"'

'"Especially now, when I have left a room, and people talking, and the stone flags ring out with my solitary footsteps, and I behold the moon rising, sublimely, indifferently, over the ancient chapel – then it becomes clear that I am not one and simple, but complex and many."'

'"I will knock. I will enter."'

'"We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory."'

'Night's elbows rested on the water and watched them.'

'history's henchmen...Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear—civilization's fear of nature, men's fear of women, power's fear of powerlessness. Man's subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.'

'She was perhaps too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for Chacko was actually a tentative, timorous, acceptance of herself.'

'He drove the thought away angrily. It returned and sat outside his skull. Like a dog.'

'She was beautiful. Old, unusual, regal.'