“Why'd you want to sing about sad things?" Candy had asked him."Because any fool can be happy," he'd said to her."It takes a man with real heart"—he'd made a fist and laid it against his chest—"to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.”

“Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.”

“The moon had risen behind him, the color of a shark's underbelly. It lit the ruined walls, and the skin of his arms and hands, with its sickly light, making him long for a mirror in which to study his face. Surely he'd be able to see the bones beneath the meat; the skull gleaming the way his teeth gleamed when he smiled. After all, wasn't that what a smile said? Hello, world, this is the way I'll look when the wet parts are rotted.”

“Maybe the man had taken the wrong turning, but at least he'd travelled some extraordinary roads.”

“We made our choice, he said. We hunted for them, we guarded their brats. God knows, we helped them make a civilization, didn't we? And why? I said I didn't know; it was beyond me. Because, he said, we thought they knew how to take care of things. How to keep the world full of meat and flowers.”

“We burn so hard, but we shed so little light; it makes us crazy and sad.”

“He[Tom] read from the Almenak."'The song that the Vigil Snake sings is in fact one immensely long word; the longest in the ancient language of the species. It is so long that an individual can sing it for a lifetime and never come to the end of it.'""That sounds like a Kleppism to me," Geneva said. "How would they ever learn it?""Good question," said Tom. "Maybe they're born with it, like a migration instinct?"'"Born with a song,"said Geneva.Tom smiled. "Yes. Don't you like that idea?""Liking it and having it be true aren't the same thing, Tom.""Huh. Sometimes you need to let things strike your heart and not your head, Geneva.”