Bod said, 'I want to see life. I want to hold it in my hands. I want to leave a footprint on the sand of a desert island. I want to play football with people. I want,' he said, and then he paused and he thought. 'I want everything.

I'm just going to stay here, in the darkness under the arch. I can hear you all out there, trip-trapping, trip-trapping over my bridge. Oh yes, I can hear you. But I'm not coming out.

Life - and I don't suppose I'm the first to make this comparison - is a disease: sexually transmitted, and invariably fatal.

For some folks death is release, and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I'm there for all of them.

It doesn't matter that I can't remember the details any longer: death happened to her. Death happens to all of us.

We do not always remember the things that do no credit to us. We justify them, cover them in bright lies or with the thick dust of forgetfulness. All of the things that Shadow had done in his life of which he was not proud, all the things he wished he had done otherwise or left undone, came at him then in a swirling storm of guilt and regret and shame, and he had nowhere to hide from them. He was as naked and as open as a corpse on a table, and dark Anubis the jackal god was his prosector and his prosecutor and his persecutor.

Going off the grid is always good for me. It's the way that I've started books and finished books and gotten myself out of deadline dooms and things.