“Inside the house was as dark as an oil slick, so you couldn't see anything moving in the room but you could sense it. It was the same sort of sensation you would experience if a closet door were to swing silently open behind your back. Later I learned a term to describe that sensation - air displacement. What I was sensing was air being displaced by something moving from one spot to another.”

“When I opened the door to her I felt like a child who believes itself lost on a swarming street and suddenly sees that all-solving outline, that indispensable displacement of air.”

“It was as if he could feel, in the deepest pit of his being, the very air in the room, filling the space like water, streaming through cracks in the frame of the window, cold, like ice-blue vapor. The sensation expanded and he sensed the wind moving around the turret that housed the sleeping quarters. It was alive, swirling over the conical roof, channeling into missing shingles and exposed rafters.”

“It was a shut door, and shut doors meant things kept to yourself. There were reasons you kept things to yourself, and they usually weren’t good, happy, open-air sort of reasons. Still, I didn’t want to see behind that door. You think you want to know everything there is to know about everything there is to know. But you don’t. Not really. I had pried the lid off of the dark places of another person before, I had seen inside. Down deep. You don’t want to look at what’s rotting there.”

“You're right, i don't have common sense. I don't want to believe what every one else believes. I have my own thoughts, things that weren't taught to me or things that I didn't read in a book. I learn from experience - you, you are afraid to experience anything and so you will always have your common sense and only your common sense.”

“That's something like the sensation of losing someone. You are never in your life so alive, and so aware of being alive, yet so isolated and abandoned, as when a loved one is taken from you. The planet will move right through you like wind through stalks of grass.”