“Dreading dusk, fearing night, praying for dawn.”

“We're going' Anne said firmly. So soon?' Percy pleaded. 'But stars come out at night.'Then they fade at dawn', Anne replied. 'This star needs to veil herself in darkness.”

“Kissing him last night at the pep rally had been like kissing an underpass.”

“She's sweet but too apocalyptic. You try kissing someone good-night who's just told you for the umpteenth time that the world's experiencing its last disgusting paroxysm before Rapture.”

“Oh, mansion shmansion. Did Gandhi's house have the largest outdoor trampoline in the tristate area? Did Jesus have a two-acre remote-controlled car track, with mountains to scale and a little village that lit up at night?Not in his Bible.”

“The mind, it occurs to me, is an engine. There is an ambient mode in which the mind sits idling, before there is information. Some minds idle in a kind of dreading crouch, waiting to be offended. Others stand up straight, eyes slightly wide, expecting to be pleasantly surprised. Some minds, imagining the great What Is Out There, imagine it intends doom for them; others imagine there is something out there that may be suffering and in need of their help.Which is right? Neither.Both.Maybe all of our politics is simply neurology writ large. Maybe there are a finite number of idling modes. Maybe there are just two broad modes, and out of this fact comes our current division.”

“There’d been blood in his eyes and Johnny was dying, but it was the most beautiful and frozen dawn Elisha had ever seen. He’d laid on the ground and stared through red stains at a bloody sun and bloody clouds and night’s last death whisper. Even the blind remember a dawn like that.”