... when he kissed her, she received the kiss without returning it, her eyes wide open, not afraid, not a virgin's eyes, just flat and uninvolved.

Laughter does not deny pain. Laughter - like a wail - acknowledges and replies to pain.

Once someone's dead you can't make them undead.

It's very hard to articulate the things that are important about writing.

They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.

For Rat Kiley, I think, facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around, and when you listened to one of his stories, you'd find yourself performing rapid calculations in your head, subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe.

If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth.