"...Her left hand was on fire — and yet it wasn't hurting her — a wild look in her eyes. Triumph. It was the last thing I remembered..." (page 385) 

"...she set my business card down on the stall door and carefully shook multicolored jelly beans into her hand from a bag that contained about four kilos of them. She shoved the pile into her mouth, chewing with her lips closed." (page 76)

"...It had to be his name. Hopper. Small time drug dealer in a faded coat, crouched in the corner of that freight elevator—" (page 83)

"There he was, Hopper: wearing the same coat from last night, the same faded jeans and Converse sneakers. He was smoking a cigarette, his shoulders hunched against the cold." (page 84)

"It looked like a costume, ornate, faintly Russian — red wool fabric, the cuffs black lamb, black cord embellishing the front." (page 93)

"...It was a seven-story derelict mess with peeling white paint, construction scaffolding, every window boarded up." (page 78)

"...I imagine the priest was quite jealous of Ashley. He adored Cordova. He must have hoped that they would one day... I don't know, live happily ever after? Like a couple of lovesick teenagers?" (page 365)

"Gallo was black-haired and heavyset — dressed in a black T-shirt and combat boots." (page 310)

"She wore a simple gray-and-black dress, plump pearls roped twice around her neck. Her oval face was attractive and soft, neatly made up, long splinters of eyebrows framing her bright brown eyes, an elegant neck like a stalk on a flower just starting to wilt." (page 317)

“She speaks to... no one. Looks at... no one. Neither does the dog. Well. My student told me that woman is Peg Martin.” (page 72) 

"...It was a cheerful inside, without the aggressive Easy Rider feel of some of the other tattoo parlors in the city, where the handle-jawed thugs wielding the tattoo guns looked like ink was just a side job..." (page 288)

"She had a tight twofold of a kirin on her ankle," he went on, resuming his work. "She wanted to know if we still had the after." (page 289)

"One minute Larry was slingin' ink? Next minute he's passed out on my floor, blood shooting outta his nose like the Bellagio fountains in Vegas. Died in the ambulance, Aneurism." (page 290)

"The funny thing is," she continued, "once the people settle in it's harder to get them to leave than stay. Briarwood is a sanctuary. It's the real world that's brutal." (page 109)

"She had black eyes, so deeply embedded in her plump face I couldn't see the whites, only the black irises sparking with light in spite of the dimness of the room." (Page 242)