“They meet in church basements and offer bandages to those wounded by the shrapnel of exploding families.”

“I sang out the words unflinchingly though, as I stomped around the toadstool in clouds of church-basement dust, with a damp Gnome hand clutched in each of mine.”

“One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope.In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive?”

“Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.”

“I am not a saint or a cripple,I am not a wound; now I will seewhether I am a coward.”

“My own view of myself was that I was small and innocuous, a marshmallow compared to the others. I was a poor shot with a 22, for instance, and not very good with an ax. It took me a long time to figure out that the youngest in a family of dragons is still a dragon from the point of view of those who find dragons alarming.”

“The tension between her lack of control and her attempt to suppress it is horrible. It's like a fart in church.”