“The stars were out in full, the crickets a little quieter. He had enjoyed talking to Allie and wondered what she'd thought about his life, hoping it would somehow make a difference, if it could.”

“That night, as Cork lay in his bedroll, he thought about the bear they were after. He was glad Sam had changed his mind about killing the great animal, but he hoped they would at least see it. He thought about the Windigo, which was something he hoped he would not see. And he thought about his father, whom he would never see again. These were all elements of his life, and although they were separate things, they were now intertwined somehow like the roots of a tree. All his life he would remember the bear hunt with Sam Winter Moon. In some manner he didn't quite understand, the hunt had opened a way in him for the grief to begin passing through. All his life he would be grateful to his father's friend.”

“Some things were certain - they had already happened - but the future could not be divined. Perhaps by Ida Paine. For everyone else, the future was no ally. A person had only his life to barter with. He felt that way. He could lose himself... or trade what he had for something he cared about. That rare thing. Either way, his life would be spent.”

“He thought of Darwin sleeping out on the pampas during his Beagle trip, a middle-class white kid travelling the world, the first of the backpackers. It was only afterwards, really, that he had made any sense of what he had seen. Alex wondered what, in the fullness of time, he himself would make sense of, what small, crucial detail might be lodging itself in his brain that would shake his life to its foundations.”

“He had always thought there was an answer to all life's mysteries in the stars, yet whenever he stared at them the answer slipped out of his grasp... But he had to think now, and he stared at the smoke-dimmed stars in the hope that they would help him, but all they did was go on shining.”

“Bruno opened his eyes in wonder at the things he saw. In his imagination he had tough that all the huts were full of happy families, some of whom sat outside on rocking chairs in the evening and told stories about how things were so much better when they were children and they'd had nowadays. He thought that all the boys and girls who lived there would be in different groups, playing tennis or football, skipping and drawing out squares for hopscotch on the ground.As it turned out, all the things he thought might be there-wern't.'' -The boy in the striped Pajamas”