The message is clear: By all means become an abomination -- but only while unhinged by grief or wrath.

That's what happens when you keep a secret from someone you love: you start to hate them for allowing you to prove your own willingness to deceive them.

Renounce love and you can achieve demonic focus.

Yes, Eden was beautiful- and if I had to squeeze through corporeal keyholes to crash it- so be it. (Hasn’t it bothered you, this part of the story, my being there, I mean? What was I doing there? ‘Presume not the ways of God to scan,’ you’ve been told in umpteen variations, ‘the proper study of Mankind is Man.’ Maybe so, but what, excuse me, was the Devil doing in Eden?) I took the forms of animals. I found I could. (That’s generally my reason for doing something, by the way, because I find I can.)

I'm an American. We're a people diseased with progress.

If Im going to invest the time in a novel, I want something more than the entertainment you get out of most genre fiction.

The first horror is there's horror. The second is you accommodate it.