“I imagine that she flushes, seeing him there, for she is at that age when even the most commonplace boys take on a sense of mystery. And this boy is not ordinary. He is wild and he has strange and fanciful perceptions. [p. 153]”

“Why did she [Madame Curie] seek to tame this mystery, which in the hands of others turned a multitude to ashes? Her work exploded with the violence of a thousand suns, but I must tell her that it was not her fault, the way they twisted her creation, tampered with her dreams."I will tell her."They said she was inhuman, heartless, but it is not so. She is here now. Weeping, she awaits me, She is carrying balm for our hands. [p, 56]”

“But she had felt since childhod that her life would n ot be ordinary. A moment would come- she would know it when she saw it- and everything would change.”

“She didn't love him and he didn't love her; she was like an addiction, and what they were doing had a darkness to it, a weight.”

“She had died at age twelve, and by now she was nothing but the memory of love-- nothing, now, but bones.”

“... the Iroquois take dreams very seriously. They see them as the secret wishes of the soul--the heart's desire, so to speak. Not all dreams, maybe, but the important ones. [p.254]”

“That there were other worlds, invisible, unknown, beyond imagination even, was a revelation to him.”