“Fairyland...Paradise...In this place and at this time, Marguerite could know that the one was a parable of the other and both were synonyms for something that had no name.”

“Even paradise could become a prison if one had enough time to take notice of the walls.”

“Perhaps if there were more time, or if time were more malleable; if she could be both places at once, live parallel lives”

“I had gone to graduate school because I loved literature, but in graduate school you were not supposed to study literature. You were supposed to study criticism. Some professor wrote a book 'proving' that TOM JONES was really a Marxist parable. Some other professor wrote a book 'proving' that TOM JONES was really a Christian parable. Some other professor wrote a book 'proving' that TOM JONES was really a parable of the Industrial Revolution. . . . Nobody seemed to give a shit about your reading TOM JONES as long as you could reel off the names of the various theories and who invented them. . . . My response was to sleep through as much of it as possible. ”

“It was him, it was always him, they only needed to stand there with their feet buried into the muddy moss and look at each other; to feel each other. Time stopped, movement disappeared and it was both the beginning of everything and the end of everything else. They had each other and there was no name, no title to it other than they just had each other. There was no necessity to be practical, what they had and what they were, was of their own and in their own and I think nothing in the world could have made Lucy happier than to have what they had, to be what they were.”

“Something happened here. In your life there are a few places, or maybe only the one place, were something happened, and then there are all the other places”