It's not sipping wine. It's a mourning wine. You drain it. Like this.

I think I've got Fear down, but how do I take it all the way up to Terror?

Never use five words if you can get away with one, eh? I've known dead men talk more than you do.

I found English to be a sort of Thomas Hardy aversion therapy.

It was a dream, and in dreams you have no choices: either there are no decisions to be made, or they were made for you long before ever the dream began.

She really was pretty, for a grown-up person, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative. I wonder what I would have done if she had smiled at me like that now: whether I would have handed my mind or my heart or my identify to her for the asking, as my father did.

I miss you', he admitted. 'I'm here', she said. 'That's when I miss you most. When you're here. When you aren't here, when you're just a ghost of the past or a dream from another life, it's easier then.