Three times a day Petrovich showed up at the nurse's office for his injections, always using the hypodermic needle himself like the most craven of junkies, though after shooting up he would play the concert piano in the auditorium with astounding artistry, as though insulin were the elixir of genius.

There are some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things.

Depending on the year or the therapist he was seeing, he'd learned to ascribe just about every facet of his character as a psychological reaction to his parents' fighting: his laziness, his overachieving, his tendency to isolate, his tendency to seduce, his hypochondria, his sense of invulnerability, his self-loathing, his narcissism.

Sourmelina's secret (as Aunt Zo put it): 'Lina was one of those women they named the island after.

There comes a moment, when you get lost in the woods, when the woods begin to feel like home.

Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.

People don't save other people. People save themselves.