To touch a person...to sleep with a person...is to become a pioneer," she whispered then, "a frontiersman at the edge of their private world, the strange, incomprehensible world of their interior, filled with customs you could never imitate, a language which sounds like your own but is really totally foreign, knowable only to them.

Truly, Autumn is my season,” the scarlet beast chorted. “Spring and Summer and Winter all begin with such late letters! But Autumn and Fall, I have loved best, because they are best to love.

Whenever one does extraordinary things, someone is bound to try to repeat them for themselves. It's the way of the world.

Temptation likes best those who think they have a natural immunity, for it may laugh all the harder when they succumb.

These are the folk who may pass into the kingdom of heaven: the grief-stricken, lovers, scholars of a certain obsessive disposition. Brute beasts. Women who have become as men and men who have become as women. Writers of books with long titles. Only those knights who have failed to touch the Grail. Industrious women. You, and I, and a boy named Oleg, and a girl with blue hair.

Every morning is a battle between the superego and the id, and I am a mere foot soldier with mud and a snooze button on her shield.

I savor bitterness - it is born of experience. It is the privilege of one who has truly lived.