“The warrior who had gone out from the lake to save his people by slaying the evil one was now just a boy sitting in the dirt with his fingers in a mane of blond hair. He stared at nothing. Expected nothing. Planned nothing. Just sat.”

“Weeks passed, Vincent did nothing - just ate, slept or sat staring at one point. [...] He wandered around the neighborhood in order to stretch his legs or just for pleasure. He walked because he was annoyed to lie, to sit or to stand. When he got tired of walking, he was sitting, lying or standing.”

“God had poked His finger down into my nerves and gently, almost without thinking, brought a little confusion among those threads. And God had pulled His finger back, and behold--there were filaments and fine rootlike threads on His finger from the threads of my nerves. And there remained an open hole behind His finger which was the finger of God, and a wound in my brain behind the path of His finger. But after God had touched me with the finger of His hand, He let me be and touched me no more and let nothing evil come upon me. He let me depart in peace and He let me depart with the open hole. And nothing evil will come upon me from God who is the Lord through all Eternity....”

“With his back to us, Sean tugs the halter from the mare's head. She kicks out, but he steps out of the way as if it were nothing at all. With a shake of her mane, she leaps mightily into the water. For a moment she struggles over the waves, and then she is swimming. Just a wild black horse in a deep blue sea full of the ashes of other dead boys.”

“We sat on the picnic bench, not talking, not looking at each other, but being quiet and okay. The rain was almost gone, nothing but a thin chilly fog. For now, I just wanted to sit on the picnic bench with him and not be anything but fine and uncomplicated.”

“Once, he'd used it in song, but the songs in his heart had gone silent long ago, and he knew that one day so would his voice. A man with nothing inside him eventually had nothing to say.”