The Fireman: A Novel

The few times in her life she had said truly nasty things to people, it had left her with a bad flavor in her mouth.

Did you ever read about the bacterium that thrives in volcanoes, right on the edge of boiling rock? That’s us. Humanity is a germ that thrives on the very edge of catastrophe.”

When you’re gone, the ones you’ve left behind get to keep the same part of you they always had.”

Your personality is not just a matter of what you know about yourself, but what others know about you. You are one person with your mother, and another with your lover, and yet another with your child. Those other people create you—finish you—as much as you create you.

In retrospect, Harper supposed it did not pay to be too impressed with a man just because he could ride a unicycle.

sometimes the face in the fire really was someone looking back at you.

Despair is no more than a synonym for consciousness.

Harper thought the gentle blessings of children were often as unprovoked, unexpected, and uncalled for as their cruelties.

She wasn’t sure good intentions always paved the road to hell, but they for sure weren’t the highest standard of medical care.

Every once in a while he would draw a sudden, startled-sounding breath, as if he had just read something terrible in the newspaper. The obituary of a friend, maybe. His own obituary.