“It struck me that this was the second time in a couple of days that just yelling someone's name on the street could have spelled disaster. Then it struck me how wrong that was. To have to keep your life sectioned off like that. A signal that you'd fallen into a bad way to live.”

“You know," someone said off to my left, "I usually find a blocking spell to be a lot more effective than yelling 'Bad dog,' but maybe that's just me.”

“I feel an overwhelming rush of sadness... I'm just struck with a sense of time passing so quickly, rushing forward. One day I'll wake up and my whole life will be behind me, and it will seem to have gone as quickly as a dream.”

“I mean only respect when I say that your mother has always struck me as someone with whom the Lord might have chosen to spend some part of His mortal time”

“And marking off time struck me as something like counting empty spaces—spaces you know can't ever be filled.”

“You don't know how you haunt and bewilder me. You don't know how the cursed carelessness that is over-officious in helping me at every other turning of my life WON'T help me here. You have struck it dead, I think, and I sometimes wish you had struck me dead along with it.”