"Know that diamonds and roses are as uncomfortable when they tumble from one's lips as toads and frogs: colder, too, and sharper, and they cut."
"I was not so old that I would deny my own senses."
"We wrapped our dreams in words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable."
"Recounting the strange is like telling one's dreams: one can communicate the events of a dream, but not the emotional content, the way that a dream can colour one's entire day."
"We knew that it would soon be over, and so we put it all into a poem, to tell the universe who we were, and why we were here, and what we said and did and thought and dreamed and yearned for. We wrapped our dreams into words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable."
"The young man shivered. He rolled the stock themes of fantasy over in his mind: cars and stockbrokers and commuters, housewives and police, agony columns and commercials for soap, income tax and cheap restaurants, magazines and credit cards and streetlights and computers... 'It is escapism, true,' he said, aloud. 'But is not the highest impulse in mankind the urge toward freedom, the drive to escape?"
"Of course, fairy tales are transmissible. You can catch them, or be infected by them. They are currency that we share with those who walked the world before ever we were here. (Telling stories to my children that I was, in my turn, told by my parents and grandparents makes me feel part of something special and odd, part of the continuous stream of life itself.)"
"Because stories start in minds-- they aren't artifacts or natural phenomena."
"If we do not fight to create a future there will be no future for any of us."
"Never use five words if you can get away with one, eh? I've known dead men talk more than you do."
"You're a poem?' I repeated.She chewed her lower lip. 'If you want. I am a poem, or I am a pattern, or a race of people whose whose world was swallowed by the sea.''Isn't it hard to be three things at the same time?''What's your name?''Enn.''So you are Enn,' she said. 'And you are a male. And you are a biped. Is it hard to be three things at the same time?"
"The moments of déjà vu were coming more frequently, now. Moments would stutter and hiccup and falter and repeat. Sometimes whole mornings would repeat. Once I lost a day. Time seemed to be breaking down entirely."
"We owe it to each other to tell stories, as people simply..."
"It’s a way of talking about lust without talking about lust, he told them. It is a way of talking about sex, and fear of sex, and death, and fear of death, and what else is there to talk about?"
"We think that tomorrow, unless we surrender, they may drop the moon on us." "You're joking.""Wish I was."
"Do not fear the ghosts in this house; theyare the least of your worries.Personally I find the noises they make reassuring,The creaks and footsteps in the night,their little tricks of hiding things,or moving them, I findendearing, not upsettling. It makes the placefeel so much more like a home.Inhabited."