“Because the world was not the world, that was the thing, that was the terrible truth he had discovered. It was a dream world, a veil of light and sound and matter that the real world hid behind. Walkers in a dream of death, that's what they were, and the dreamer was the girl, this Girl from Nowhere. The world was a dream and she was dreaming them!”

“The world was a world of dreaming souls who could not die.”

“Just ten minutes, but everything was different now. He was different, the world was different. His father was nowhere in it. And with that, tears came to his eyes.”

“Mankind had built a world that would take hundred years to die. A century for the last lights to go out.”

“This ravishing world. This achingly bittersweet, ravishing world.”

“Before she became the Girl from Nowhere-the One Who Walked In, the First and Last and Only, who lived a thousand years-she was just a little girl in Iowa, named Amy. Amy Harper Bellafonte.”

“How stark everything became, at the end, all the wishes for one's children distilled by the world's swift cruelty into the desperate hope that death would take them fast.”