"I knew that suffering can purify, that it's a kind of fire that can be worth enduring, but there were degrees of it to which I chose not to subject myself."
"Such grief might be to them quite delicious, a delicacy."
"Free will," she agreed, "our greatest gift, the thing that makes life worth living, in spite of all the anguish it brings."
"Small-town boy meets big-time evil."
"That I had come full circle shouldn't have surprised me, for we are born into time only to be born out of it, after living through the cycles of the seasons, under stars that turn because the world turns, born into ignorance and acquiring knowledge that ultimately reveals to us our enduring ignorance: The circle is the essential pattern of our existence."
"As I turned to leave the tent, she said, "Don't worry. Your own mother wouldn't know you."I said, "She never has."
"...on a subconscious level we're aware that time isn't enduring, that it is not a required condition of our existence, that there comes a point when we will have no need of it."
"Her direct stare probed, as if the story of my life were written in my eyes in a few succinct lines that she could read."
"...and where the Ferris wheel carried its passengers high and brought them low and raised them high and brought them low again, as if it were not merely a carnival ride but also a metaphor for the basic pattern of human experience."
"...Here lie your hopes and dreams, shattered and swept aside..."
"I needed a moment to understand that I'd been dreaming, that I had come awake, and another moment to remember where I had gone to bed."