“If he didn't care about you, you couldn't upset him.”

“I think . . . I said things to Silas. He'll be angry.''If he didn't care about you, you couldn't upset him,' was all she said.”

“Us in the graveyard, we wants you to stay alive. We wants you to surprise us and disappoint us and impress us and amaze us.'I think...I said things to Silas. He'll be angry.''If he didn't care about you, you couldn't upset him,”

“Really, he thought, if you couldn't trust a poet to offer sensible advice, who could you trust?”

“You got to understand the god thing. It’s not magic. It’s about being you, but the you that people believe in. It’s about being the concentrated, magnified, essence of you. It’s about becoming thunder, or the power of a running horse, or wisdom. You take all the belief and become bigger, cooler, more than human. You crystallize.” He paused. “And then one day they forget about you, and they don’t believe in you, and they don’t sacrifice, and they don’t care, and the next thing you know you’re running a three-card monte game on the corner of Broadway and Forty-third.”

“The best thing—in Shadow's opinion, perhaps the only good thing—about being in prison was a feeling of relief. The feeling that he'd plunged as low as he could plunge and he'd hit bottom. He didn't worry that the man was going to get him, because the man had got him. He was no longer scared of what tomorrow might bring, because yesterday had brought it.”

“He wondered how it could have taken him so long to realize he cared for her, and he told her so, and she called him an idiot, and he declared that it was the finest thing that ever a man had been called.”