“With an incredulous sigh, I found myself still shaking my head. It all seemed so improbable but I knew he was right. That was the most frustrating part of it all. I knew about the bunyip. How many times had I heard the word as a child? I even knew that they liked still water, quiet billabongs. But if I walked into the Rangers office at Central Station and told them they had a bunyip in their lake! Once more I shook my head. They wouldn’t even bother to lock me up. They would probably take the report and then just file it somewhere... like in the bin, like I was a nutter.”

“I knew I had to be careful. I had to keep my distance. If she knew how much I still cared, it was all over. I wouldn’t be able to walk away again. The first time was hard enough.”

“I knew all this, I understood the rules, but still, nothing broke my heart like the slow death of a shared joke that had once seemed genuinely funny.”

“To me the great divide is between the talkative and the quiet. Do they just say everything that's on their minds, even before it's on their minds? Sometimes I think I could just turn up my head like a Walkman so what's going on there could be heard by others. But there would still be a difference. For inside the head they are talking to people like them, and I am talking to someone like me: he is quiet and doesn't much like being talked at; he can't conceal how easily he gets bored.”

“He smiled at me, and just like that I was completely happy to be who I was. I knew it wouldn't be easy all the time, but right now it was as simple as sunshine because Nathan was here and had helped me to realize that I was still Ramsey, no matter how much things had changed.”

“I tried to imagine him capital-S Somewhere as we prayed, but even then I could not quite convince myself that he and I would be together again. I already knew too many dead people. I knew that time would now pass for me differently then it would for him- that I, like everyone in that room, would go on accumulating loves and losses while he would not. And for me, that was the final and truly unbearable tragedy: Like all the innumerable dead, he'd once and for all been demoted from haunted to haunter.”