“...to experience the reality was to suffer a boredom as endless as the illness itself...the boredom of insanity was a great desert, so great that anyone's violence or agony seemed an oasis, and the brief companionship seemed like a rain in the desert that was numbered and counted and remembered long after it was gone.”

“Deborah’ın, insan maddesi taşısa bile, kendisiyle insan ırkının öteki üyeleri arasındaki mesafenin ne denli büyük geldiğini bu insanlara anlatması olanaksızdı.”

“The creative strength is good enough and deep enough to bring itself to flower and to grow in spite of this sickness.”

“The horror of the Pit lay in the emergence from it, with the return of her will, her caring, and her feeling of the need for meaning before the return of meaning itself.”

“I'm sorry I'm young," Deborah answered with a bitterness that was half prose. "We have a right to be as crazy as anyone else." The second part was more a plea, and to her surprise the superbly inhuman fighter smiled softly and said, "Yes ... I suppose that's true, though I never thought of it in those terms before.”

“Sometimes the world is so much sicker than the inmates of its institutions.”

“Yr had a region called the Fear-bog. Lactamaeon had taken her there once to see the monsters and corpses of her nightmares accumulating there from year after year of terrifying dreams. They had swum through the almost solid ground.She had said, What is that awful stench?Shame and secrecy, Bird-one, shame and secrecy, he had answered.”