“He ran knowing the best water lay ahead.”

“Whatever lay ahead, he was glad to be alive.”

“He saw: this water ran and ran, incessantly it ran, and was nevertheless always there, was always at all times the same and yet new in every moment!”

“Nicholas Benedict did have an exceptional gift for knowing things (more exceptional, in fact, than most adults would have thought possible), and yet not even he could know that this next chapter was to be the most unusual-and most important-of his entire childhood. Indeed, the strange days that lay ahead would change him forever, though for now they had less substance than the mist through which he ran.”

“In his fantasy, he kissed his best friend again, pulled back, and… “I love you,” he said into the spray of the shower. “I… love you.” As he closed his eyes against the pain, it was hard to know how much of what ran down his cheeks was water, and how much was something else.”

“The moving cliff gave us the feeling we had to look behind us to know what lay ahead.”