“How long can we maintain? I wonder. How long before one of us starts raving and jabbering at this boy? What will he think then? This same lonely desert was the last known home of the Manson family. Will he make that grim connection..”

“No matter how hard he tried, he just couldn’t let them go. He wanted to start fresh, but there is no denying the heart what it longs for – especially when it longs for home.”

“What will the last syllable of recorded time be, and who will be the one to write it? No matter how long we live, we still wonder when our world will end and how.”

“Am I racially kin to this man? Baynes wondered. So closely so that for all intents and purposes it is the same? Then it is in me, too, the psychotic streak. A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power. How long have we known this? Faced this? And—how many of us do know it?”

“How long can a man live on the outside before he loses his ability to love? How long before there's no more hope?”

“What makes a man a man? A friend of mine once wondered. Is it his origins? The way he comes to life? I don't think so. It's the choices he makes. Not how he starts things, but how he decides to end them.”