You always run into something no matter where you go. Turns out you’re someplace after all.

James could do all this because he had made a bargain with himself: he wouldn’t try to get killed, nor would he try to survive. He could do all this because he felt terribly sorry for the men he rescued. They harbored the saddest and most foolish desire of all. The desire to go on living.

When will she discover that I am from a lesser race of immortals? But the high deities have always needed pixies to persuade them down to earth. When she no longer needs an intermediary, will she still love me?

Frances is a diamond, passed from filthy paw to paw but never diminished. The men who handle her can leave no mark because her worth is far above them. Hard, helpless, buried. You can hear it in her voice and see it in her eyes, she is waiting for a strong and fearless miner to go way down and rescue her up to the surface where she can shine for all she’s worth.

But I have discovered something about modest people. They’re just waiting for the call. Then they are the first over the wall and into the temple.

I thought I would get calmer, surer, but each time we come close I feel almost sick at first. As though each time vibrates with the times before. I feel a terrible sorrow coming up my throat, I don’t know why. And it can only be consoled against the length of her body. Lying down with her for the first time... all the pain I didn’t know I had, till at her touch it disappeared like smoke. Is this what purgatory feels like? To burn painlessly? If so, why isn’t it called heaven?

As for sin. I honestly can’t believe God is so bored or so lecherous as to care how close my body and its various parts get to someone else’s various parts.

It’s a sin for Lily to let Mercedes think it was Daddy who beat up Frances. But he has done it in the past. Surely truth can be borrowed across time without perishing. Shelf life, so to speak.

It’s where she belongs, she craves the caress of the violent shore, to come alive like that once more in a clash of stone and then to die.

She never knows when it might strike. The rage. And when it does, she loses her grip on herself – literally. At times, she could swear she sees another self – shiny black phantom, faceless, as though clad in a bodysuit – leaping out of her, pulling the rest of her in its wake. Over the edge.