“Who else had ever met the business-end of a bolt of lightning in mid-flight, as he had just now, flying blind through a storm, lost a wing, managed to come down still alive even if it is on a wooded mountainside, to cut the contact at the moment of crashing so that he wasn't roasted alive, and crawl out with just a wrenched shoulder and a lot of cuts and bruises? He couldn't bail out because he was flying too low, hoping for a break through the clouds through which to spot something flat enough to come down on; he doesn't like bailing out anyway, hates to throw away a good plane. ("Jane Brown's Body")”

“For a long while- for many years, in fact- he had not thought of how it was before he came to the farm. His memory of those times was like a house where no one lives and where the furniture has rotted away. But tonight it was as if lamps had been lighted through all the gloomy dead rooms. It had begun to happen when he saw Tico Feo coming through the dusk with his splendid guitar. Until that moment he had not been lonesome. Now, recognizing his loneliness, he felt alive. He had not wanted to be alive. To be alive was to remember brown rivers where the fish run, and sunlight on a lady's hair.”

“He studied my appearance carefully. “You cut your hair.” “Yes. Do you like it?” “That depends. How long is it?” I pulled a curl down and showed him it ended just past my shoulder. He grunted, “That’s still long enough, so I like it.” “Long enough for what?” “Long enough for a man to run his hands through.”

“He falls quiet again and tries to understand how he can be saying these things, how it can be that his dark words are coming out into the light and yet he is still alive. At once he storms the doorway that has suddenly opened for him in the endless corridor in which he has been bumping around for years; words spill out, cut off, confused, ashamed, squeezing out.”

“Out of the night Hopper came, and Perrin was one with the wolf. Hopper, the cub who had watched the eagles soar, and wanted so badly to fly through the sky as the eagles did. The cub who hopped and jumped and leaped until he could leap higher than any other wolf, who never lost the cub's yearning to soar through the sky. [...] Something crashed into his head, and as he fell, he did not know if it was Hopper or himself who died.”

“Well, it's like that myth about the hero. He made wings out of wax so he could fly, but when he got too close to the Sun, to God, the wax melted and he crashed to the ground”