“He wasn't in a safe little story where wrongs were automatically righted; he was still in the real world, where bad bitter things happened for no reason, and people paid for things that weren't their fault.”

“It was easy to forget that other people lived in a world where rules and laws and common sense could keep you safe. A world where, if you did the right thing you were allowed to get on with your life in whichever way you chose.”

“In an industry where people merely *play* heroes, he was the real thing.”

“The first thing he noticed was how quiet it was. This was nothing like the kind of quiet he heard when he woke up in the middle of the night after a bad dream. When that happened, there were always strange, unidentifiable sounds seeping into his room from the tiny gaps where the windowpanes weren't sealed together correctly. At those moments he could always tell there was life outside, even if all that life was fast asleep. It was a silence that wasn't silence at all.”

“And all the while, I suppose," he thought, "real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them ...”

“Here was a place where real things were going on. Here was a scene of vital action. Here was a place where anything might happen. Here was a place where something would certainly happen.”