I rang the bell and she opened the door, dried her hands, and said heartily: 'Hello, stranger. I was just saying to Cliff only tonight, it's about time you showed up around here.' I wanted to detach him from her, but first I had to sit through about ten minutes of her. She was my sister, but you don't tell women things like I wanted to tell him. I don't know why, but you don't. You tell them the things you have under control; the things that you're frightened of, you tell other men if you tell anyone.

Fear! Fear again, for the first time since his 'teens. Fear, that he thought he would never know any more. Fear that no weapon, no jeopardy, no natural cataclysm, has ever been able to inspire until now. And now here it is running icily through him in the hot Chinese noon. Fear for the thing he loves, the only fear that can ever wholly cow the reckless and the brave.

Beside her, her husband could only splutter, and he stopped even that when she half turned to flash him a smile - the instinctive, brilliant smile of a woman who knows what feeble creatures men can be. You couldn't learn to smile like that. It was something a woman either knew the minute she was born, or never knew at all. ("I'm Dangerous Tonight")

You see, this would be a death by the imagination. And though the imagination feeds on phantoms, it needs a premise in reality to begin with. Then it can go on from there under its own power.

Time is strange. A moment can be as short as a breath, or as long as eternity.

It's hard to say goodbye for good at any time or any place. It's harder still to say it through a meshed wire. It crisscrossed his face into little diagonals, gave me only little broken-up molecules of it at a time. It stenciled a cold, rigid frame around every kiss.

The girl's face was the color of talcum. Her uncle's was a death mask, a bone structure overlaid by parchment. Shane's was granite, with a glistening line of sweat just below his hair line. He'd never forget this night, the detective knew, no matter what else happened for the rest of his life. They were all getting scars on their souls, the sort of scars people got in the Dark Ages, when they believed in devils and black magic. (Speak To Me Of Death)