Look,' I said, struggling to keep up, 'I just wanna make one thing absolutely clear. I don't believe in guns. I just want peace. Okay?' Alessandro stopped in the middle of the corridor, took out the gun, and wrapped my hand around it before I realized what he was doing. 'Can you feel that? That's a gun. It exists. And there are a lot of people out there who do believe in it. So, excused me for taking care of them so you can have your peace.

I am sorry I didn’t tell you the truth before. I was hoping I wouldn’t have to. You kept asking about Romeo and what he was really like. I was hoping that”—he smiled wistfully—“you would recognize me.

It's what we call a dolce pazzia... a sweet madness. Once you feel it, you will never want to leave it.

By the time we left college, I had become my own image: a dandelion in the flower bed of society. Kinda cute, but still a weed.

I wish I had the power to flip my reality upside down like an hourglass, and that life wasn't a finite affair, but rather a perpetually recurring passage through a hole in time.

She had died peacefully, in her sleep, after an evening of listening to all of her favorite Fred Astaire songs, one crackling record after another. Once the last chord of the last piece had died out, she had stood up and opened the French doors to the garden outside, perhaps waiting to breathe in the honeysuckle one more time.

In many ways, a degree in the history of ideas is the ideal training for an aspiring writer.