In the particular dwells the tawdry. In the conceptual dwells the grand, the transcendent, the everlasting. Earthly countries and single malignant boys can go to hell; the idea of countries and the idea of sons triumph for eternity.

Kevin was a shell game in which all three cups were empty.

You can call it innocence, or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: she assumed that everyone else was just like her.

You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.

When you've been afraid of something for long enough and it comes to pass, the terrible thing is a release. For in the belly of the badness there is no more fear.

A lot of people get so hung up on what they can't have that they don't think for a second about whether they really want it.

I seem to remember even from when I was very young that when you loved someone you also hated them for making you love them, since loving someone is so incredibly humiliating.