“Destiny struggles to reassert the pattern that was meant to be.”

“What was destiny? What was the power that shaped the patterns and attempted to enforce them? God? Should she be raging at God - or begging Him to let her son live and to spare her from the life of a cripple? Or was the power behind destiny merely a natural mechanism, a force no different in origin from gravity or magnetism?”

“Night has patterns that can be readless by the living than by the dead.”

“With his eyes squinted to slits, Donny reminds me of Clint Eastwood, if Clint Eastwood were eight inches shorter, thirty pounds heavier, less good-looking, with male-pattern baldness, and badly scarred.”

“He would pray...for everyone who knew pain, which meant everyone who wore a human face.”

“Hell of a thing to have to experience, hell of a thing to have to see, to be reminded you're a human being and all it meant to be one.”

“...he was part of a family whether he wanted to be or not, the family of humanity, more often than not a frustrating and contentious clan, flawed and often deeply confused, but also periodically noble and admirable, with a common destiny that every member shared.”