“Is it possible that that's all maturity is? Speaking better? Is it possible that everybody in the world, is just a dumb, stupid kid acting like a grown-up because they can sound like one and look like one? It almost seems easy.”

“Noon. In the middle of Knoll Road. In it up to your waist, wearing your father’s old reindeer sweater, your mother’s fur-lined gloves. Squinting across an infinite ocean of white. Shivering. Breathing. Listening. To nothing. There are no cars, no mailboxes, no traffic islands, no sound. The triple-deckers are now double-deckers and everything’s muffled and buried and gone. You yell and you are the only one yelling. The only one breathing. The only one there. The faint chime of a city plow in the distance. The wail of one of Schoerner’s penned-up hounds. But no one is with you. No one to contradict you. And you dare to close your eyes and fill up your lungs with winter, your destiny before you like a map of the world. And the wind seems to whisper promises, and you, with arms outstretched and chin to the heavens, swear oaths back to the wind - little things, like fulfilling prophecies and charting new courses and going forth from this time and this place to do great and wondrous things. But first, of course, it will be necessary to get high.”

“Suspended for fighting. It had a ring. Not simply suspended, which could be for any number of inane infractions from skipping algebra to drawing nude cartoons of the principal and his staff on random backgrounds. Suspended ... for FIGHTING! It made you sound like something. Like a real badass dude from way back.”

“If she's amazing, she won't be easy. If she's easy, she won't be amazing. If she's worth it, you wont give up. If you give up, you're not worthy. ... Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.”

“Several factors besides skill are more significant in professional writers than in most amateurs. One is love of the surface level of language: the sound of it; the taste of it on the tongue; what it can be made to do in virtuosic passages that exist only for their own sake, like cadenzas in baroque concerti. Writers in love with their tools are not unlike surgeons obsessed with their scalpels, or Arctic sled racers who sleep among their dogs even when they don't have to”

“Me only have one ambition, y'know. I only have one thing I really like to see happen. I like to see mankind live together - black, white, Chinese, everyone - that's all.”

“George is a goblin who looks like a young boy. He is explaining to his friend Lout, an ogre, that he’s really older than he seems - - -“My people grow slowly and I’ve been around longer than you think. I’m very mature for my age. I have a doctorate degree from Oxford in Medieval Literature,” said George.“Is Oxford really in this story?” asked Lout.“I should have said Oxxphord.”“That sounds better. I’m really impressed, George. With an education like that, you could get a great job.”“Yeah, that’s how I ended up as a stable boy.”