“Once when Monty was in kindergarten, I had read to him and was trying to get him to go to sleep. He said he didn't want to close his eyes because "It's dark in there.”

“Death," said Akiva. His life was leaving him fast now that he no longer held his wound. His eyes just wanted to drift closed. "I'm ready.""Well, I'm not. I hear it's dull, being dead."She said it lightly, amused, and he peered up at her. Had she just made a joke? She smiled.SmiledHe did, too. Amazed, he felt it happening, as if her smile had triggered a reflex in him. "Dull sounds nice," he said, letting his eyes flutter closed. "Maybe I can catch up on my reading.”

“His friends told him that nobody was interested in his goddam soul unless it was the priest and he managed to answer that no priest taking orders from no pope was going to tamper with his soul. They told him he didn't have any soul and left for the brothel.He took a long time to believe them because he wanted to believe them. All he wanted was to believe them and get rid of it once and for all, and he saw opportunity here to get rid of it without corruption, to be converted to nothing instead of to evil. The army sent him halfway around the world and forgot him. He was wounded and they remembered him long enough to take the shrapnel out of his chest - they said they took it out but they never showed it to him and he felt it still in there, rusted, and poisoning him - and then they sent him to another desert and forgot him again. He had all the time he could want to study his soul in and assure himself that it was not there. When he was thoroughly convinced, he saw that this was something that he had always known.”

“I cut off his fingers to get him to talk, and when he'd confessed everything I wanted to hear, I had his fucking tongue cut out, and the stump cauterized."Everyone in the room stared at him."I called him an asshole, too," said Locke. "He didn't like that.”

“He tried to remember Moon Child's eyes, but was no longer able to. He was sure of only one thing: that her glance had passed through his eyes and down into his heart. He could still feel the burning trail it had left behind. That glance, he felt, was embedded in his heart, and there it glittered like a mysterious jewel. And in a strange and wonderful way it hurt.Even if Bastian had wanted to, he couldn't have defended himself against this thing that had happened to him. However, he didn't want to. Oh no, not for anything in the world would he have parted with that jewel. All he wanted was to go on reading, to see Moon Child again, to be with her.IT never occurred to him that he was getting into the most unusual and perhaps the most dangerous of adventures. But even if he had known this, he wouldn't have dreamed of shutting the book.”

“What the hell was that?""Puma," he said. "Mountain lion.""I knew that was a lion." She stopped suddenly. "You didn't hurt him, did you?""Marcie, he wanted to eat you! Are you worried about his soul or something?""I just wanted him to go away," she said. "I didn't want him to go dead."-Marcie and Ian”