That which is imagined can never be lost.

My imagination is my polestar; I steer by that.

You cut up a thing that's alive and beautiful to find out how it's alive and why it's beautiful, and before you know it, it's neither of those things, and you're standing there with blood on your face and tears in your sight and only the terrible ache of guilt to show for it.

How many human eyes...had snatched glimpses of their secret anatomies, down the passage of years?

You'll learn, honey. Love can be the best thing in life. And it can be the worst. The absolute worst.

Richard Christian Matheson is a master of compression. He knows how to catch a moment in words and convey it straight to the reader's heart.

I am a man, and men are animals who tell stories. This is a gift from God, who spoke our species into being, but left the end of our story untold. That mystery is troubling to us. How could it be otherwise? Without the final part, we think, how are we to make sense of all that went before: which is to say, our lives? So we make stories of our own, in fevered and envious imitation of our Maker, hoping that we'll tell, by chance, what God left untold. And finishing our tale, come to understand why we were born.