“...the long train ride was like traveling through limbo. You weren't anywhere when you were on a train, she decided. You weren't where you had been, and you weren't yet where you were going. You were nowhere. It might be beautiful outside the window-and it was, she had sense enough to realize that-but it wasn't anywhere to her, just a scene passing by that was framed by the train window. (p160)”

“Your traveling companion, the soldier, is well trained. The two of you were planning something, weren't you?""Planning what? An evil scheme to steal all the Big Macs left in the McDonalds along 1-99?”

“Away in the distance, a train appeared behind the trees, all its compartments were lit, the windows were sure to be open. One of us started singing a ballad, but we all wanted to sing. We sang far quicker than the speed of the train, we swung our arms because our voices weren't enough, our voices got into a tangle where we felt happy. If you mix your voice with others' voices, you feel as though you're caught on a hook. (trans. Michael Hofmann)”

“Initially, he worried that he might be going crazy. But then he decided if you felt you were crazy you weren't really crazy because he had heard somewhere that crazy people didn't know they were insane.”

“Real, she imagined later on, was something else; it had nothing to do with things you could touch. Real was being seen, noticed, acknowledged, and later remembered. Real was people thinking about you when you weren't in the room. If others thought about you, then you must be more than a made-up dream. You need other people to be real, she decided. Otherwise you might just be a speck, an atom, inventing an elaborate story. It seemed like a paradox, but it must be so. She knew other people were real by thinking about them. Her thinking of her parents and her brothers, her school friends, were proof that they were real. They were both outside and in her head. But how could she be sure she was in anyone's head?”

“It was darker in the tower than any place Devnee had ever been. The dark had textures, some velvet, some satin. The dark shifted positions.The dark continued to breathe. The breath of the tower lifted her clothing like the flaps of a tent, and sounded in her ears like falling snow.It's the wind coming through the double shutters, Devnee told herself.But how could the wind come through? There were glass windows between the inside and outside shutters.Or were there?The windows weren't just holes in the wall, were they?What if there was no glass? What if things crawled through those open louvers, crept into the room, blew in with the cold that fingered her hair? What creatures of the night could slither through those slats?She had not realized how wonderful glass was, how it protected you and kept you inside.She knew something was out there.”