“I can’t tell you if the stories are true. Men lie without meaning to. They talk as if they had been part of a thing that happened to someone they never knew and only heard of by sixth remove.”

“The vampire was real. It was only that his true story had never been told.”

“Sometimes,” Sam says, “I can’t tell when you’re lying.”

“I never lie,” I lie.”

“Miss Mary, having been a journalist, had splendid powers of invention. I had never heard her tell a story in the same way twice and always had the feeling she was remolding it for the later editions.”

“I was a new person then, I knew things I had not known before, I knew things that you can know only if you have been through what I had just been through.”

“Did you ever dream you had a friend, Alec? Someone to last your whole life and you his. I suppose such a thing can’t really happen outside sleep.”

“If there was one thing I had never been, it was mysterious, and if there was one thing I had never done, it was not talk.”

“I have outlived the diagnosis, I’ve been able to receive and hear and process some of the most wonderful, nice things about me that I might not have ever heard had I not gotten sick. Again think, how many people who pass away never hear the eulogies, never hear the thank-yous? I’ve been very lucky, folks, in I can’t tell you how many ways.”

“Goodbye. You have gone to the place where we can never meet again
I can't accept the coldness of an eternal parting
I wish I could have heard you say
That surely, you had loved me
Only once, even if it were a lie”

“What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this -- two things: I crave truth. And I lie.”