kissing pillows, breathing gin

"Like David, he’s dead below the skin. His innards have been gutted, slashed, pulled about. Inside his chest is a cavern, and dripping slabs of muscle hang from his ribs like meat from butcher’s hooks. No one knows about this abattoir within his body - or maybe his mother does. No one except maybe Beattie knows that Rory needs to stay indoors watching the world through a window because when he steps outdoors, the meat hanging on his ribs swings and sorrows with the wind."

"A life, at its end, is a pile of cloth and paper, and goods that can be bagged and labelled. None of the best things - the voice and the laugh, the tilt of the head, the things seen and felt and spoken - are allowed to stay behind."

"I am dying: it’s a beautiful word. Like the long slow sigh of the cello: dying. But the sound of it is the only beautiful thing about it."