“The difference between him and the other boys at such a time was that they knew it was make-believe, while to hime make-believe and true were exactly the same thing. This sometimes troubled them, as when they had to make-believe that they had had their dinners.”

“Thus did the terrified three learn the difference between an island of make-believe and the same island come true.”

“Things aren't like this," he kept repeating. "It shouldn't be this way." As if he had access to some other plane of existence, some parallel, "right" universe, and had sensed that our time had somehow been put out of joint. Such was his vehemence that I found myself believing him, believing, for example, in the possibility of that other life in which Vina had never left and we were making our lives together, all three of us, ascending together to the stars. Then he shook his head, and the spell broke. He opened his eyes, grinning ruefully. As if he knew his thoughts had infected mine. As if he knew his power. "Better get on with it," he said. "Make do with what there is.”

“And yet, he had this: the ability to make you believe in him and want to fight for him because, without any reservation, he believed in you in a way you did not yet believe in yourself.”

“there are the non-believers, make believers and true believers!”

“That was when Angel Wells became a fiction writer, whether he knew it or not. That's when he learned how to make the make-believe matter to him more than real life mattered to him; that's when he learned how to paint a picture that was not real and never would be real, but in order to be believed at all- even on a sunny Indian summer day- it had to be better made and seem more real than real; it had to sound at least possible.”