“I've got a secret for you," she whispered with n unpleasant grin on her face, "Something terrible is going to happen. Something terrible... and something wonderful.”

“If your heart tells you something but your mind tells you something else, which do you believe? Both are just as apt to lie. In fact, they play at deceit all the time. Mostly they balance each other, giving us that crucial reality check. But what happens on the rare occasions when they conspire together?”

“All I'm saying is that, unless you're immortal, nothing can really belong to you. The best you can hope for is to hold something for a while, but in the end you've got to give it back.”

“When I touched that boy, I felt something. Something awful. Something I can’t describe.”“We all felt it,” Nick said.“You may have felt it, but I caused it.” Then both his eyes seemed to go far away. “Something changed out there. I don’t know what it was, but something in the world changed because that kid didn’t deserve what I did to him—and the powers that be know that I did it.” Nick watched as a tear fell from his Everlost eye and disappeared through the living world table.“What if,” said Nick, not even sure what he was going to say yet, “what if you were that kid and you were told you could change the world, but you would have to sacrifice yourself to do it?”Clarence chuckled at the thought. “I believe that question was already asked a long time ago, and that creepy kid did not look anything like Jesus to me.”“But you do think that something changed. . . .”“I don’t know whether it’s good or bad.”“What if it’s neither?” suggested Nick. “What if we get to make it one or the other?”

“Don't you recognize me, Mary? It's your good friend Allie the Outcast - although it looks like you're the one who's the out-cast now." Then Allie realized something with far too much glee. "Now that you're here - alive and all - there's something I've wanted to do for a very long time."Then Allie reached back, curled her fleshie's right hand into a fist, and swung it toward Mary with all her might.This was one strong fleshie!The punch connected with Mary's eye so hard, that Mary's entire body spun around, and she collapsed into a leopard chair. Allie's knuckles hurt, but it was a good kind of pain."My eye!" wailed Mary. "Oh! My eye.”

“This book is so interesting. I always wonder what's going to happen next.”

“Life is like a bad haircut. At first it looks awful, then you kind of get used to it, and before you know it, it it grows out and you gotta get another haircut that maybe won't be so bad, unless of course you keep going to SuperClips, where the hairstylists are so terrible they oughta be using safety scissors, and when they're done you look like your head got caught in a ceiling fan. So life goes on, good haircut, bad haircut, until finally you go bald, and it don't matter no more. I told this wisdom to my mother, and she said I oughta put it in a book, then burn it. Some people just can't appreciate the profound.”