“Now that Scotty has entered the realm of myth, everyone wants to own him. And maybe they should. Doesn't a myth belong to everyone?”

“Now there are permanent gray smudges in Scotty's vision. He says he likes them--actually, what he says is: "I consider them a visual enhancement." We think they remind him of his mom.”

“And Alex understood that Scotty Hausmann did not exist. He was a word casing in human form: a shell whose essence has vanished.”

“Redemption, transformation--God how she wanted these things. Every day, every minute. Didn't everyone?”

“And Phoebe saw, with a dreadful clarity, that in the end she'd failed to interest her mother enough, failed to hold her attention. Some flaw within herself made her extraneous to everyone. She stopped on a corner overwhelmed by a terrible pain. It was her fault, her own fault. She'd done everything wrong.Wait, she thought, but wait - walking again, faster now - maybe she'd misunderstood, maybe the deal with her mother had been that they each would live a secret life and not tell the other, but Phoebe hadn't realized - she'd failed to live the secret life and now her life was only this, a hundred empty years stretched uselessly behind her.”

“Power is like that; everyone feels it at once.”

“Everyone we've lost, we'll find. Or they'll find us.”