“Your God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says, do what you like, guys, oh, but don't eat the apple. Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting "Gotcha". It wouldn't have made any difference if they hadn't eaten it.''Why not?''Because if you're dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won't give up. They'll get you in the end.”

“Bean finds the best apple in our tree and hands it up to me. "You know what this tastes like when you first bite into it?" she asks. "No, what?" "Blue sky." "You're zoomed." "You ever eat blue sky?""No," I admit. "Try it sometime," she says. "It's apple-flavored.”

“You must get hurt a lot," he murmured. She looked at him in surprise."Why do you say that?" "Because you don't hide anything. You put yourself out there for the world to like or dislike.”

“Some guys have it real fucked up in prison, real hard. Some guys will be doing somebody's laundry. Some guys will be on their stomach with the pillow in their mouth, some guys will be getting stabbed. If you're a man on the streets and you eat well, you'll eat well in prison. It just might be different food.”

“Rix stroked the Glove. "There was a garden and a tree grew there with golden apples and if you ate one of them, you knew everything. And then Sapphique climbed over the fense and killed the many-headed monster and picked the apple, because he wanted to know, you see. He wanted to know how to Escape.""Right." She had wriggled back. She was close to his pocked face."And a snake came out of the grass and it said, 'Oh go on, eat the apple. I dare you.' And he stopped then with it to his mouth because he knew the snake was Incarceron."Keiro groaned. "Let me...""Put the Glove away, Rix. Or give it to me."His fingers caressed its dark scales. "And because if he ate it he would know how small he was. How much of a nothing he was. He would see himself as a speck in the vastness of the Prison.""So he didn't eat it, right?”

“An apple’s core principle it to not get eaten. And who wants to eat the core of an apple anyway?”