“Either that boy is the sanest creature on Earth, he thought, or he is so disturbed that our tests cannot even begin to scratch the surface.”

“He thought of himself not as something heavy that left tracks behind it, but if anything, as a speck upon the surface of an earth too deeply asleep to notice the scratch of ant feet, the rasp of butterfly teeth, the tumbling of dust”

“If we isolate the stray thought, the passing thought,” he said, “the thought whose origin is unfathomable, then we begin to understand that we are routinely deranged, everyday crazy.”We loved the idea of being everyday crazy. It rang so true, so real.“In our privatest mind,” he said, “there is only chaos and blur. We invented logic to beat back our creatural selves. We assert or deny. We follow M with N.”Our privatest mind, we thought. Did he really say that?“The only laws that matter are laws of thought.”His fists were clenched on the tabletop, knuckles white.“The rest is devil worship," he said.”

“One day God felt he ought to give his workshop a spring clean... It was amazing what ragged bits and pieces came from under his workbench as he swept. Beginnings of creatures, bits that looked useful but had seemed wrong, ideas he'd mislaid and forgotten... There was even a tiny lump of sun. He scratched his head. What could be done with all this rubbish?”

“The look of disbelief that ran across the boy's face was somehow more disturbing than the despair it had replaced. This creature had given up hope long ago; he probably begged out of habit rather than expectation.”

“We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being. The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong.”