“This is the essence of travel, or at least travel taken to completion: it's not the change of scenery, or the new way of preparing lamb - it's you. You are lost to yourself, you don't know who will emerge from the pit.”

“It's like time travel only, you know, slower...”

“I love the way that each book -- any book -- is its own journey. You open it, and off you go. You are changed in some way, large or small, by having traveled with those characters.”

“How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?Travellers at least have a choice. Those who set sail know know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are prepared. But for us, who travel to cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparation. We who are fluent find life is a foreign language. Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back worse.”

“Travellers at least have a choice. Those who set sail know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are prepared. But for us, who travel along the blood vessels, who come to the cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparation. We who were fluent find life is a foreign language. Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse.”

“No matter how many sins you make or how slow you travel back toward God's valley, you are still way ahead of a person who never made a mistake and doesn't know what it is like to climb out of a pit of shame and rise above their temptations.”