But you must stop playing among his ghosts -- it's stupid and dangerous and completely pointless. He's trying to lay them to rest here, not stir them up, and you seem eager to drag out all the sad old bones of his history and make them dance again. It's not nice, and it's not fair.

Words, he decided, were inadequate at best, impossible at worst. They meant too many things. Or they meant nothing at all.

There are no simple words. I don't know why I thought I could hide anything behind language.

It’s an odd thing, happiness. Some people take happiness from gold. Or black pearls. And some of us, far more fortunate, take their happiness from periwinkles.

Do you become in visible?' 'No. I'm there, if you know how to look. I stand between the place you look at and the place you see. Behind what you expect to see. If you expect to see me, you do. I listen in places where no one expects me to be.

Love is an obsolete emotion, ranking in usefulness somewhere between earwigs and toe mold.

Shall I add a man to my collection?