"Gabriel scowled through his glasses. Why were ghosts such imbeciles? Who could be blamed for striving, at any cost, to avoid forever the decay-of-self that death was?"

“How, he wondered forlornly, and when, did I become indistinguishable from the bad guys?”

“The wages of courage is death, lad, but it’s the wages of everything else, too.”

“Art, like a lot of things, is a lost art.”

“I’m not a joiner. Any time you work with people, they turn out to be inept clowns.”

“Sukie had always said that the Alice books were the Old and New Testaments for ghosts—which Pete had never understood; after all, Lewis Carroll hadn’t been dead yet when he’d written them.”

“It wasn’t fair, but fairness was something you had to go get; it wasn’t delivered like the mail.”