"Dreams, after all, are insubstantial things, like mist itself."
"One of his followers murmured agreement, but another quietly slipped away. Now there was Norton and four others. Maybe that wasn't so bad. Christ Himself could only find twelve."
"It took me twenty years of living with my father to accept the idea that being good could be good enough."
"The perception of a child who has not yet learned to protect itself by developing the tunnel vision that keeps out ninety percent of the universe."
"You know what talent is? The curse of expectation. As a kid you have to deal with that, beat it somehow. If you can write, you think God put you on earth to blow Shakespeare away. Or if you can paint, maybe you think--I did--that God put you on earth to blow your father away."
"When rationality begins to break down, the circuits of the human brain can overload. Axons grow bright and feverish. Hallucinations turn real: the quicksilver puddle at the point where perspective makes parallel lines seem to intersect is really there; the dead walk and talk; a rose begins to sing."