“Let the world move along as it pleased. If it had any business with him, it would be sure to tell him.”

“If there's any guy crazy enough to attack me, I'm going to show him the end of the world -- close up. I'm going to let him see the kingdom come with his own eyes. I'm going to send him straight to the southern hemisphere and let the ashes of death rain all over him and the kangaroos and the wallabies.”

“The loudest sigh in the world would never wake him up.”

“The things she most wanted to tell him would lose their meaning the moment she put them into words.”

“I could disappear from the face of the earth, and the world would go on moving without the slightest twinge. Things were tremendously complicated, to be sure, but one thing was clear: no one needed me.”

“It was a stillness so profound one had to adjust one’s hearing to it.....The silence seemed to be trying to tell him something about itself.”

“He was up to his neck in it. He was breathing the air of its world, adapting to its gravity. The story's essence had permeated every part of him, to the walls of his viscera.”