Lucius Shepard

"She’s sad because she’s drinking to be sad because she’s afraid that what she does not feel is actually a feeling. Typical post-modern Manhattan bullshit."

"In mine, while there was also agony, it was essentially a love affair with revolution, with the idea of revolution. And as with all great passions, what was most alluring was not the object of passion but the new depth of my own feelings. Thus I was blind to the realities underlying it."

"I submit that all psychotherapy is manipulation; that as psychiatrists we do not heal people, but manipulate their neuroses into functional modes."

"Manipulate? Yes, I manipulated. And despite the ensuing events, I would do so again, for it is the function of psychiatry to encourage the living to live."

"The Southern education stuffs you full of incontrovertible proof that the Rebel defeat was a wild and improbable stroke of misfortune, that the unbeatable military genius of the Confederacy was foiled by an alliance of fate and Yankee treachery. If Stonewall hadn’t misplaced his boots, if Jeb hadn’t gone dancing the night before, if the creek didn’t rise. If, if, if. Acceptance of this viewpoint often leads to embarrassment in later life."

"And that in itself was a sufficient reason to hit him, purely for educational purposes: I had, you see, reached the level of drunkenness at which an amoral man such as myself understands his whimsies to be moral imperatives."

"We uncovered new forces, we took a step along what may be an endless path toward divinity, we redirected the entire thrust of psychoanalytic theory, and, as with all knowledge, we found that deeper and more compelling mysteries yet lay beyond those we had reduced to the security of fact."

"“You had no right,” I said. “You—” Tuu’s face hardened. “We had no right to mislead you? Please, Mr. Puleo. Between our peoples, deception is a tradition.”"

"It was easy to see how one could think of the family as a single terrible creature stretching back through time, some genetic flaw or chemical magic binding the spirit to the blood."

"“An attic’s the afterlife of a house,” said Otille, opening the door. “Or so my mother used to say.”"

"The half moon sailed high, sharp-winged shadows skimming across it, and the conical hills and the vine-shrouded trees washed silver-green under the moonlight had the look of a decaying city millennia after a great catastrophe."

"The necessary had been accomplished. That’s the way Les Invisibles work. Singular, unquantifiable events. Impossible to treat statistically, to define with theory."