“The whole room said, "Admire without touching anything and then get out.”

“Then he went out without touching anything and put his arm around Ingeborg, and like that, with their arms around each other, they returned to the village while the whole past of the universe fell on their heads.”

“Like Midas, the Rationalist is always in the unfortunate position of not being able to touch anything, without transforming it into an abstraction; he can never get a square meal of experience.”

“Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Familes are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole.”

“He said he–meaning you–had been addicted to this drug he fed Sunshine. Getting anything that personal out of you is like removing a tooth from a lion without a tranquilizer. (Talon)”

“It's like looking through a microscope your whole life," he (Justin) said. "You miss the whole picture. Sometimes you need to get lost in order to discover anything.”