“There are many wonders in this world that will remain quite beyond your reach unless, in fact, you reach for them.”

“But … even if I did – which I didn’t – how could I have found them myself, found them old and faded? If I only wrote them down myself – later? How can Sebastian have found them a hundred years ago – if I hadn’t even written them yet? And where did the information come from?”

“The O was not a number – a zero. It was a letter – the first letter of the word One. But it was far more than that. It was a symbol in itself – the symbol of unity. The perfect circle. Of the complete unit. The never ending. The One.And the snake? The snake was not a perfect circle. It could never be unified – not even if it began to eat its own tail. The symbol of one who depends only upon itself for nourishment.”

“What the tide takes away, the tide brings back.”

“There was no answer. I looked up.Epsilon’s light shone out onto a picture on the wall.A round picture in a square frame.The golden symbol of O. The One. The symbol of perfection.The symbol of eternity. The One without beginning or end.The One who is the beginning and the end.The One to whom time is meaningless. The One who could do whatever he wanted with time. What had Mrs. Shiling said, in the kitchen, a year ago?“Time is nothing. Not to him. A moment in time. What is that t him?”Quivering from head to toe, I stared up at that simple O.”

“Why on earth do adults have to laugh so loudly at everything? Hyena laughs, the women worse than the men—except for the times the men were worse than the women.”

“Over the course of weeks, taking great care never to revel her inward state of flux, Percy had evaluated her situation, observing her feelings from all angles before finally reaching the conclusion that she was, quite clearly, several shades of crazy.”