I debated doing a storm post for this book, but I have some time, so I guess you get one, haha. This book does not lend itself to pulling out a couple of witty sentences here and there. But on reflection - there are so many sentences in this book; a few are bound to work for my purpose!
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"A lucky man, I've always said, is a man who was lucky once, and after that, he learned a thing or two about investment."
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One of the main characters, assessing another:
His prosperity sat easily with him, Moody thought, recognizing in the man that relaxed sense of entitlement that comes when a lifelong optimism has been ratified by success.
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Another of the twelve, making an observation about the men and a local prostitute:
"Every man has his currency," Gascoigne added after a moment. "Perhaps it's gold; perhaps it's women. Anna Wetherell, you see, was both."
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Some subtle humor:
"My father hails from the county Tyrone. Before I came here, I was in Dunedin; before that, I was in New York."
"New York - now there's a place!"
The reverend shook his head. "Everywhere is a place," he said.
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Charlie Frost was no great observer of human nature, and as a consequence, felt betrayed by others very frequently.
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And this part, describing Anna's relationships with her customers - while she is representing the moon, astrologically speaking.
The men with whom she plied her trade were rarely curious about her. If they spoke at all, they spoke about other women - the sweethearts they had lost, the wives they had abandoned, their mothers, their sisters, their daughter, their wards. They sought these women when they looked at Anna, but only partly, for they also sought themselves: she was a reflected darkness, just as she was a borrowed light. Her wretchedness was, she knew, extremely reassuring.
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"I daresay the afterlife is a very dreary place."
"How do you conceive it so?"
"We spend our entire lives thinking about death. Without that project to divert us, I expect we would all be dreadfully bored. We would have nothing to evade, and nothing to forestall, and nothing to wonder about. Time would have no consequence."
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He possessed a fault common to those of high intelligence, however, which was that he tended regard the gift of his intellect as a license of a kind, by whose rarefied authority he was protected, in all circumstances, from ever behaving ill.
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When the sun and moon meet:
"I am afraid I am interrupting your solitude," Anna said.
"No, no," the boy said. "Oh, no. Solitude is a condition best enjoyed in company."
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And a segment about the same, from one of the long chapter introductions:
... a connexion by virtue of which he feels less, rather than more, complete, in the sense that her nature, being both oppositional to and in accord with his own, seems to illuminate those internal aspects of his character that his external manner does not or cannot betray, leaving him feeling both halved and doubled, or in other words, doubled when in her presence, and halved when out of it...
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