“He felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside.”

“The Moth don't care when he sees The Flame. He might get burned, but he's in the game. And once he's in, he can't go back, he'll Beat his wings 'til he burns them black... No, The Moth don't care when he sees The Flame. . .The Moth don't care if The Flame is real, 'Cause Flame and Moth got a sweetheart deal. And nothing fuels a good flirtation, Like Need and Anger and Desperation... No, The Moth don't care if The Flame is real. . . ”

“The circus collects the outsiders like a flame tempts moths.”

“The white moth of hope fluttered before her face.”

“He felt a fluttering inside his chest that he mistook for an air pocket - probably left from when he pushed himself through the cage. He had no way of knowing that the fluttering was a single beat from the fleeting memory of a heart.”

“The first thing he noticed was how quiet it was. This was nothing like the kind of quiet he heard when he woke up in the middle of the night after a bad dream. When that happened, there were always strange, unidentifiable sounds seeping into his room from the tiny gaps where the windowpanes weren't sealed together correctly. At those moments he could always tell there was life outside, even if all that life was fast asleep. It was a silence that wasn't silence at all.”