“Each of her soothing utterances battered me more grievously than the last—as if I were traveling in a perverse ambulance whose function was to collect a healthy man and steadily damage him in readiness for the hospital at which a final and terrible injury would be inflicted.”

“Sit down before you hurt your owies.” “I am a Dark One!” he said, managing to stand upright at last, ignoring the pain and tearing feeling on his left side. “We do not have owies! We have grievous, nearly fatal injuries!”“Pia,” Cora said(...). “Would you please get Alec a chair before he does more damage to, or topples over from, his grievous, nearly fatal injuries?”

“In her final years she would still recall the trip that, with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia, became more and more recent in her memory.”

“If it weren't for the Chicagos and Detroits and Toledos, the terrible things would spread out across the whole country and make trouble for everybody else. Such places were collectors of badness in the way hospitals were collectors of the sick and damaged.”

“There are much more terrible things than physical injury.”

“Hate isn't healthy, it damages the hater more than the one who's hated!”