“One moment the world is as it is. The next, it is something entirely different. Something it has never been before.”

“But the sky was never quite the same shade of blue again. I mean the world looked different forever after, and even in moments of exquisite happiness there was the darkness lurking, the sense of our frailty and our hopelessness.”

“The great adventure of our lives. What does it mean to die when you can live until the end of the world? and what is 'the end of the world' except a phrase, because who knows even what is the world itself? I had now lived in two centuries, seen the illusions of one shattered by the other, been eternally young and eternally ancient, possessing no illusions, living moment to moment in a way that made me picture a silver clock ticking in a void: the painted face, the delicately carved hands looked upon by no one, looking out at no one, illuminated by a light which was not a light, like the light by which god made the world before He had made light. Ticking, ticking, ticking, the precision of the clock, in a room as vast as the universe.”

“The supernatural world has always been more real to me than the real world.”

“You see that old woman? That will never happen to you. You will never grow old, and you will never die.And it means something else too, doesn't it? I shall never ever grow up.”

“Something in me was responding now as the audience responded, not in fear, but in some human way, to the magic of that fragile painted set, the mystery of the lighted world there.”

“It was over now, and the meaningless world was tolerable and need not be explained. And never would it be, and how foolish I had ever been to think so.”