“It was on the steamer carrying him through the Golden Gate that he happened to reach down into the hole in the lining of the right pocket of his overcoat and discover the envelope that his brother had solemnly handed to him almost a month before. It contained a single piece of paper, which Thomas had hastily stuffed into it that morning as they all were leaving the house together for the last time, by way or in lieu of expressing the feelings of love, fear, and hopefulness that his brother's escape inspired. It was the drawing of Harry Houdini, taking a calm cup of tea in the middle of the sky, that Thimas had made in his notebook during his abortive career as a librettist. Josef studied it, feeling as he sailed toward freedom as if he weighed nothing at all, as if every precious burden had been lifted from him.”

“He felt as if someone had reached into his chest and cut off a tiny piece of his heart and made him eat it.His heart tasted very bitter to him, and he hated Peter more than ever, although part of him still loved hishandsome older brother and always would.And although the taste had been bitter, he had liked it.Because it was his heart.”

“Days and nights passed over this despair of flesh, but one morning he awoke, looked (with calm now) at the blurred things that lay about him, and felt, inexplicably, the way one might feel upon recognizing a melody or a voice, that all this had happened to him before and that he had faced it with fear but also with joy and hopefulness and curiosity. Then he descended into his memory, which seemed to him endless, and managed to draw up from that vertigo the lost remembrance that gleamed like a coin in the rain - perhaps because he had never really looked at it except (perhaps) in a dream.”

“Reggie made him feel like he was nine years old and out for dinner with his family at the Ponderosa Steak House and he had run into his French teacher and his mother invited her to dine with him.Reggie made him feel like he was sitting in a public bathroom stall and someone had come into the bathroom and began singing a song about what a stinky bastard he was while he was in there sweating it out.Reggie made him feel like someone had taken the red Tonka fire engine he had always wanted and painfully corkscrewed it down the front of his jeans.Reggie made him feel like the ice cream man had just rolled by and all his dead grandparents were mooning him out the truck window.”

“Tonight his father had caught up, carrying all the horrors of hell with him. His mother could no longer protect him—hide him—and now his father‟s wrath would fall on him. He ran across the fields and through the forest, his bare feet carrying him as fast as they could go, aching and bleeding into the night. He could feel his father‟s eyes on him and his stinking breath filling Raven‟s nostrils as he rushed toward the only place he had ever found safe. He sobbed, choking on his grief and his frustration—the horrible guilt of carrying all the anger from his father into their house making him sick and afraid. He ran with lungs and muscles burning from strain, throwing himself through the doors of the castle when he reached them and only then chancing to look back the way he‟d come.”

“At first, man was enslaved by the gods. But he broke their chains. Then he was enslaved by the kings. But he broke their chains. He was enslaved by his birth, by his kin, by his race. But he broke their chains. He declared to all his brothers that a man has rights which neither god nor king nor other men can take away from him, no matter what their number, for his is the right of man, and there is no right on earth above this right. And he stood on the threshold of freedom for which the blood of the centuries behind him had been spilled.”