Books should make somebody look at how they feel, be honest with themselves.

Behind their eyes the hope was sickening and in many, dead. They lived from event to event with a subtle terror of the gap between, filling up their lives with distractions to avoid the emptiness where curiosity should have been.

But I think humans are innately religious as a species, so you don't need a specific excuse for examining the perversely unholy.

It was as though in these last minutes together - when they had so much to say - they could say nothing of the least significance, for fear it open the floodgates.

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

I've never worked where it was hard to be gay. Besides, being gay is a spectacular irrelevance to getting on with your life.

The moon had risen behind him, the color of a shark's underbelly. It lit the ruined walls, and the skin of his arms and hands, with its sickly light, making him long for a mirror in which to study his face. Surely he'd be able to see the bones beneath the meat; the skull gleaming the way his teeth gleamed when he smiled. After all, wasn't that what a smile said? Hello, world, this is the way I'll look when the wet parts are rotted.