“-"your nocturna will never take another human, not for all the length of time in the universe and beyond. Your nocturna is wedded to your soul. Some even say"..."that it is the nocturni who carry souls into the Shadow World when we die, where they will keep watch over them and keep them safe forever. Some say that is nocturni's ultimate purpose.”

“There is a nocturna for every single person in the world! And each night the nocturni sip dreams from the River of Knowledge, and fly out into the world, and deliver them to their humans.”

“Are seeds of hope, yes. Of course."..."The nocturni are the bearers of the hope seeds."..."That's why it's such bad luck to cross them...They carry the seeds Above, and plant them in souls where they're needed.”

“The thing is, you don't get to know. It's not like you wake up with a bad feeling in your stomach. You don't see shadows where there shouldn't be any. You don't remember to tell your parents you love them or--in my case--remember to say good-bye to them at all.”

“I don't understand how everything changes, how the layers of your life get buried. Impossible. At some point, at some time, we must all explode.”

“But...books are so much more. Some of them are webs; you can feel your way along their threads, but just barely, into strange and dark corners. Some of them are balloons bobbing up through the sky: totally self-contained, and unreachable, but beautiful to watch.And some of them―the best ones―are doors.”

“They haven't killed us yet," I say, and I imagine that one day I will fly a plane over Portland, over Rochester, over every fenced-in city in the whole country, and I will bomb and bomb and bomb, and watch all their buildings smoldering to dust, and all those people melting and bleeding into flame, and I will see how they like it. If you take, we will take back. Steal from us, and we will rob you blind. When you squeeze, we will hit. This is the way the world is made now.”