He could hardly imagine anymore what his life would be without the weight of his hidden knowledge. He'd come to think of it as a kind of penance. It was self-destructive, he could see that, but that was the way things were. People smoked, they jumped out of airplanes, they drank too much and got into their cars and drove without seat belts.

The city of Pittsburgh gleaming suddenly before her . . . so startling in its vastness and its beauty that she had gasped and slowed, afraid of losing control of the car

Its impossible to control the reception of your work - the only thing you can control is the experience of writing itself, and the work you create.

You missed a lot of heartache, sure. But David, you missed a lot of joy.

There was something not quite right about her eagerness, an eerie kind of voyeurism in her need for bad news.

It seemed there was no end at all to the lies a person could tell, once she got started.

The thing is, I used to like that: feeling special because I knew something no one else did. It's a kind of power, isn't it, knowing a secret? But lately I don't like it so much, knowing this. It's not really mine to know, is it?