“...they cupped their wings around their happiness and called it a world, though they both knew it was not a world, only a hiding place, which is a very different thing.”

“The Morganville in her wanted to tell people to go home and be safe, but she knew that was verging on crazy. The world these laughing people lived in was a very different place. She was in a very different place.”

“As though all the world were a bad joke and she was the only one around who knew the punchline.”

“If wishes solved problems, the world would be a very different place.”

“The point I would make is that the novelist and the historian are seeking the same thing: the truth – not a different truth: the same truth – only they reach it, or try to reach it, by different routes. Whether the event took place in a world now gone to dust, preserved by documents and evaluated by scholarship, or in the imagination, preserved by memory and distilled by the creative process, they both want to tell us how it was: to re-create it, by their separate methods, and make it live again in the world around them.”

“If such a thing called happiness exists in this world, it should be something which resembles the limitless nothingness. Nihility is having nothing and having nothing to lose. If that isn't "happiness", then what is?”