Promises were like bad checks, easy to write and hard to cash.

For such people the consummate act of moral clarity was a lynching or a suicide bombing, a fatwa or a pogrom. And they were ascendant now, rising like dark stars over a terminal landscape .

We spent a lot of time discussing cosmology first. I think that was your father's unique way of evaluating people. You can tell a lot about a person, he once said, by the way they look at the stars.

Ecstasy hates company.

Promises were like bad checks, easy to write and hard to cash.

It was the kind of experience, Molly said, that would grow calluses on an angel's ass.

Children wear their natures like brightly-colored clothes; that's why they lie so transparently. Adulthood is the art of deceit.