One of the things I'm trying to do over and over again in my books is create new mythologies, create new ways to understand the complexity of the world. I think what mythology does is impress upon chaotic experience the patterns, hierarchies and shapes which allow us to interpret the chaos and make fresh sense of it.

Nothing else wounds so deeply and irreparably. Nothing else robs us of hope so much as being unloved by one we love

She wanted nothing that he could offer her, except perhaps his absence.

There’s no conscious thing on the face of the world that doesn’t know dread more intimately than its own heartbeat.

any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.

Well, here he was. They could save each other, the way the poets promised lovers should. He was mystery, he was darkness, he was all she had dreamed of. And if she would only free him he would service her - oh yes - until her pleasure reached that threshold that, like all thresholds, was a place where the strong grew stronger, and the weak perished. Pleasure was pain there, and vice versa. And he knew it well enough to call it home.

With the inevitability of a tongue returning to probe a painful tooth, we come back and back and back again to our fears, sitting to talk them over with the eagerness of a hungry man before a full and steaming plate.