“Maybe, he thinks, as he’s riding on through the snow, maybe this is why she’s leaving. Maybeshe fell in love with me when we were kids. And now: and now: and now: we’re not kids anymore.”

“The last four dayswhere everything has finally made some sense. And why is she so ready to throw this away? Because.Because eventually every relationship she’s been in has turned to shit. Eventually she ends upscrewing everything up. So maybe it’s better to leave now before people’s feelings get hurt.”

“Maybe. Because he’s got to try. Because she is too interesting, too beautiful not to even do anything.”

“But why? Why did you do the evil things you did?' Billy asks suddenly.'Ah, because I could not imagine consequences,' the Professor says. 'To do harm, to live through evil, is to align oneself with chaos. Now it is the same chaos which is slowly destroying me.”

“His face almost looked the way it did when he was a teenager, when there was the subtle expression of both confidence and mischief in his darkly handsome eyes. When I think of him now, though, I don’t picture his face the way it is. What I see is from a memory, from a moment when he must have been eleven or twelve years old and we were both in our backyard and it was summertime and I was drawing in a coloring book and he was there in the green grass and he didn’t know I was watching him. He was crawling around on all fours; he was practicing being a lion or a tiger or more probably a leopard and he was growling to himself, stalking the shadow of a bird, and he didn’t see me staring at him and I think my mother was there, looking at us from an upstairs window, watching us both and gently smiling, and what I remember most is that all of us were happy then with who we were at that moment; at that moment, all of us were quietly happy.”

“-Are you ready to return to the outside world, Billy?-No, definitely not, sir.-Well, you can't stay here forever now, can you?-Why not? I'm not bothering anybody, sir.-Because it's not healthy. You're a very special young man, Billy. It's time you found that out on your own, out there. The world may not be as terrible as you think.-I would like to stay here one more month, if I may, sir.-One more month? Why?-Summer will be over, sir. I can't go out there if it's going to be summertime.-And why not?-I wouldn't want to see any young girls playing. I would not want to see any flowers outside.-Why?-Because everything happy right now is going to die.-But Billy...-I would not like to be reminded of anything pretty.-But Billy, of course, anything might...-I would not like to be reminded.-OK, OK. We will se what we can do, Billy.”

“Maybe that's why people have friends at all. Not because they like them so much but because they don't make them feel so much worse.”