“If Arkansas is, indeed, one big family, Eureka Springs remains its eccentric uncle.”

“Most of us have one BIG IDEA at some point in our lives. That Eureka! moment. It comes to us all in different ways, often by chance of serendipity.”

“Eureka .. Eureka!”

“Like him, Uncle had eccentric tastes and liked old things. The difference, Silas was beginning to see, was that Uncle saw such objects as extensions of himself, of his body, essential, required, uniquely his. This thought made Silas uneasy.”

“To think that the affairs of this life always remain in the same state is a vain presumption; indeed they all seem to be perpetually changing and moving in a circular course. Spring is followed by summer, summer by autumn, and autumn by winter, which is again followed by spring, and so time continues its everlasting round. But the life of man is ever racing to its end, swifter than time itself, without hope of renewal, unless in the next that is limitless and infinite.”

“Chacko had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and was permitted excesses and eccentricities nobody else was. He claimed to be writing a Family Biography that the Family would have to pay him not to publish. Ammu said that there was only one person in the family who was a fit candidate for biographical blackmail and that was Chacko himself.”