“Help, I said. “Is this real? Am I still me?”The Stranger comforted, “Everything stays true. You are yourself, no matter how much you have to change.”But what had I done? I couldn’t remember; I must have made each required movement…I must have passed instinctively through the motions that somehow changed me from girl to woman. Although if there was such a transformation, I had not witnessed it.”

“I am grieved at what you tell me," said Pellinore, "but I believe that God can change destiny. I must have faith in that.”

“You have not realized how I have developed. I was a schoolboy when you knew me. I am a man now. I have new passions new thoughts new ideas. I am different but you must not like me less. I am changed but you must always be my friend.”

“I admit I must have been impossible to live with. It was the self-righteousness of the grieving--my idea that I would betray him if I carried on as before, if I went through the motions of living--that must have driven my family apart from me. I still do not understand those instincts that lead you to flee the ones who want to help you, that lead you to take revenge upon them for a sorrow that is not their fault.”

“And if she had not come back to me...if you had not come...if I had known for sure that both of you were dead...Then I would still have lived...and done what must be done. So will you.”

“And then you came along and you spoke to me and nobody had looked me in the eye for years. (...) But I remember you that day and you looked at peace with yourself and it made me reconsider everything I had planned to do. Because I thought to myself, you can't do this to her, not after the Hermit thing.""Do what to me? I don't think leaving me on that platform would have changed my life, Griggs," I lie."You being on that platform changed mine.”