“Other men puffed, snorted, and splashed. George passed through the ocean with the silent dignity of a torpedo. Other men swallowed water, here a mouthful, there a pint, anon, maybe, a quart or so, and returned to the shore like foundering derelicts. George's mouth had all the exclusiveness of a fashionable club. His breast stroke was a thing to see and wonder at. When he did the crawl, strong men gasped. When he swam on his back, you felt that that was the only possible method of progression.”

“I saw him open his mouth wide. . . as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.”

“What the Lady was happening? The man had his mouth smashing on Tarin's, and his tongue was shoving at Tarin's tongue. Tarin tried to scream. The men did eat boys. It wasn't just a scary fire-rumor. He bucked his body and writhed. He was going to be consumed alive!"Lady!" he bawled like a little kid. It sort of worked. The man moved his mouth and laughed."Now, no fussing. I won't hurt you if you're a good boy.""Don't eat me," moaned Tarin. He was too scared to be brave. This was why no boys ever escaped from the Before Times buildings. The men ate them! No wonder men were so sleek and strong. They had boy meat to get them through the winter”

“Poor George [Bush], he can't help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.”

“Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America -- that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement. At any rate, that is how it seemed to young George Webber, who was never so assured of his purpose as when he was going somewhere on a train. And he never had the sense of home so much as when he felt that he was going there. It was only when he got there that his homelessness began.”

“In his book "Men to boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity", Gary Cross asks simply: "Where have all the men gone?" Like George Will, Victor David Hanson, and others who've posed that question, Professor Cross is no doubt aware that he sounds old and square. But in a land of middle-aged teenagers somebody has to.”