“..."I could see tongues of dense fog licking over the ridge in the distance, where this world ended and the next one began, cold, damp, and sunless.”

“And that is how someone who is unusally susceptible to nightmares, night terrors, the Creeps, the Willies and the Seeing Things That Aren't Really There talks himself into making one last trip to the abandoned, almost-certainly-haunted house where a dozen or more children met their untimely end.”

“I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen.”

“...so one day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn't become an explorer because everything in the world had already been discovered. I'd been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.”

“Because we weren’t like other people. We were peculiar.”“Peculiar how?”“Oh, all sorts of ways,” he said. “There was a girl who could fly, a boy who had bees living inside him, a brother and sister who could lift boulders over their heads.”

“If I never went home, what exactly would I be missing? I pictured my cold cavernous house, my friendless town full of bad memories, the utterly unremarkable life that had been mapped out for me. It had never once occurred to me, I realized, to refuse it.”

“I discovered Emerson's soporific qualities by falling asleep with my face in the book, drooling all over an essay called 'Self-Reliance'...”