“For the very first time Andrew realized that life, real life, had no connection with the way people spent their days, whose lips they kissed, what medals were pinned on them, or the shoes they mended. Life, real life went on soundlessly...ultimately there was no difference between Queen Victoria and the most wretched beggar in London: both were complex machines made up of bone, organ, and tissue, whose fuel was the breath of God.”

“Why had his mother gone to the trouble of bringing him into the world if the most exciting moment in his life was having been made lame by a bayonet?”

“Before cruelly vilifying them from a great height, the mudslingers at newspapers and journals should bear in mind that all artistic endeavors were by and large a mixture of effort and imagination, the embodiment of a solitary endeavor, of a sometimes long-nurtured dream, when they were not a desperate bid to give life meaning.”

“Writers perform an extremely important role: they make others dream, those who are unable to dream for themselves. And everyone needs to dream. Could there be any more important job in life than that?”

“He was back at the point of departure, at the place that filled writers with dread and excitement, for this was where they must decide which new story to tackle of the many floating in the air, which plot to bind themselves to for a lengthy period; and they had to choose carefully, study each option calmly...because there were dangerous stories, stories that resisted being inhabited, and stories that pulled you apart while you were writing them...At that moment, before reverently committing the first word to paper, he could write anything he wanted, and this fired his blood with a powerful sense of freedom, as wonderful as it was fleeting, for he knew it would vanish the moment he chose one story and sacrificed all the others.”

“Ultimately it was man's limited senses which established the boundaries of the world.”

“The most terrifying thing is sometimes not what we see, but rather what we are forced to imagine.”