“Gosh, it's easy!' he marveled, open-mouthed. 'I never knew before how easy it is to kill anyone! Twenty years to grow 'em, and all it takes is one little push!'He was suddenly drunk with some new kind of power, undiscovered until this minute. The power of life and death over his fellowmen! Everyone had it, everyone strong enough to raise a violent arm, but they were afraid to use it. Well, he wasn't! And here he'd been going around for weeks living from hand to mouth, without any money, without enough food, when everything he wanted lay within his reach all the while! He had been green all right, and no mistake about it! Death had become familiar. At seven it had been the most mysterious thing in the world to him, by midnight it was already an old story. ("Dusk To Dawn")”

“Life, he realized, was much like a song. In the beginning there is mystery, in the end there is confirmation, but it's in the middle where all the emotion resides to make the whole thing worthwhile. For the first time in months, he felt no pain at all; for the first time in years, he knew his questions had answers. As he listened to the song that Ronnie had finished, the song that Ronnie had perfected, he closed his eyes in the knowledge that his search for God's presence had been fulfilled. He finally understood that God's presence was everywhere, at all times, and was experienced by everyone at one time or another. It had been with him in the workshop as he'd labored over the window with Jonah; it had been present in the weeks he'd spent with Ronnie. It was present here and now as his daughter played their song, the last song they would ever share. In retrospect, he wondered how he could have missed something so incredibly obvious. God, he suddenly understood, was love in its purest form, and in these last months with his children, he had felt His touch as surely as he had heard the music spilling from Ronnie's hands.”

“For this, that now was coming, he had very little curiosity. For years it had obseessed him; but now it meant nothing in itself. It was strange how easy being tired enough made it.Now he would never write the things he had saved to write, until he knew enough to write them well”

“He thought of how convincingly he could describe this scene to friends and make them envy the fullness of his contentment. Why couldn't he convince himself? He had everything he'd ever wanted. He had wanted superiority--and for the last year he had been the undisputed leader of his profession. He had wanted fame--and he had five thick albums of clippings. He had wanted wealth--and he had enough to insure luxury for the rest of his life. He had everything anyone ever wanted. How many people struggled and suffered to achieve what he had achieved? How many dreamed and bled and died for this, without reaching it?”

“He had plans all right, he thought as Sarah trotted off. To eat crow.He wasn't sure what it tasted like, but he already knew he wasn't going to enjoy it. He walked around to the office, knocked. He supposed if he'd been wearing a hat,he'd have held it in his hands.”

“The more he thought about his mother, the more he could see that while they were on different roads, they were each just plain lost. In their life together as a family, maybe for the last ten years, maybe longer, they’d all been living in a kind of perpetual twilight. Not light. Not dark. Not anything. And then when his dad disappeared, the lights went out, and Silas and his mom had been wandering around in the dark looking for a switch. Could he blame her because she hadn’t found one either? Each of them had been looking for a way out of their own black midnights, and each of them still had a long way to go until they found some kind of dawn.”