“He had in abundance youth’s most dangerous qualities: optimism and relentlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.”

“Everything had to have a weakness. It was the balance of nature. Faeries, humans, they all had weakness. If he could control his weaknesses to make them nonexistent, then he was dangerous. He was probably the most dangerous creature in existence.”

“He would say that God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have had no tail and no flies.”

“He had no longer any need for home, for he carried his Gormenghast within him. All that he sought was jostling within himself. He had grown up. What a boy had set out to seek a man had found, found by the act of living.”

“As she watched him she understood the quality of his beauty. How his labor had shaped him. How the wood he fashioned had fashioned him. Each plank he planed, each nail he drove, each thing he made molded him. Had left its stamp on him. Had given him his strength, his supple grace.”

“He thirsted for this resurrection and renewal. The vile bog he had gotten stuck in of his own free will burdened him too much, and, like a great many men in such cases, he believed most of all in a change of place: if only it weren't for these people, if only it weren't for these circumstances, if only one could fly away from the curses place--then everything would be reborn! That was what he believed in and what he longed for.”