“I have had my say, as he wished. Now the book belongs, as he points out, to the world he claims to speak for.”

“Sometimes Chris wished he could sneak a peek at the back of the book, so to speak, and see how it was all going to turn out, so that he wouldn't have to bother going through the motions.”

“I knew what he was saying, and I wished to God he was someone else, someone who didn't have to say things out loud.”

“In the shadows of the dreamland, he waits. He watches the gaping windows to the world he had so longed to open. Now flown wide, bleak and empty, ravaged-like him-it grants his wish. He belongs. It cannot compare to the memory of her eyes. Blue azure, warm as a summer sky. If he could but fall into their world. Would that he had. Now he write the end to the story that past its Midnight Dreary-that too late and hour-has its own without him. It was always, he knows now, meant to end this way. Like that circle that "ever returneth into the selfsame spot." My beautiful, my Isobel. My Love. You ask me to wait. And so I wait. For all of this, I know, is but a dream. And when, in sleep, at last we wake, I will see you again.”

“He no longer cared about anything (as before) but now he also cared about everything in principle; that is to say, it was all the same to him and he belonged to the world and there was nothing he could do about it.”

“What a queer planet!" he thought. "It is altogether dry, and altogether pointed, and altogether harsh and forbidding. And the people have no imagination. They repeat whatever one says to them . . . On my planet I had a flower; she always was the first to speak . . .”