“It was a cold, bleak December morning in Alaska, a place so far north on planet Earth that if there were such things as popsicle people, they could live there quite comfortably.”

“There is nothing for you in this bleak hospital room but a cold and empty nothingness that has no answers, can give no peace, will provide no comfort to the living.”

“It was the comfort of knowing that she was not quite so strange, that there were other people who found delight in private challenges and quiet lives. People who lived in their thoughts as much as in the real, physical world.”

“I Have been asked to tell you about the back of the north wind. An old Greek writer mentions a people who lived there, and were so comfortable that they could not bear it any longer, and drowned themselves. My story is not the same as his. I do not think Herodotus had got the right account of the place. I am going to tell you how it fared with a boy who went there.”

“A cold wind was blowing from the north, and it made the trees rustle like living things.”

“Cold in the earth—and fifteen wild Decembers,From those brown hills, have melted into spring.”