“It was like the calm just as one engaged in battle, Will thought, when thought fled and inevitability took over.”

“Phantoms of thought and memory thinned and fled.”

“Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, she became a butterfly.”

“I thought he had taken my soul, said Rev. I thought he took mine, too. But no one can. It's just been sleeping.”

“The sky lay over the city like a map showing the strata of things and the big full moon toppled over in a furrow like the abandoned wheel of a gun carriage on a sunset field of battle and the shadows walked like cats and I looked into the white and ghostly interior of things and thought of you and I looked on their structural outsides and thought of you and was lonesome.”

“Now the line was drawn. Lucy had never thought that one of the fiercest battles of her life would be fought over a breakfast table, with quiet words carefully chosen.”