“Everything seemed to flood over him then. It was as though he’d been the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, refusing to let the sea of reason in.”

“For hero-worship often defeats its own ends; the boy who "cannot tell a lie," the boy who kept his finger in the hole in the dike, tend to become myths, admired perhaps but to be neither imitated nor equalled.”

“He’d never liked tea. It seemed somewhat ridiculous to him, to interrupt his day with miniature cakes and dry, crustless sandwiches, and fragile china that always seemed about to snap in half between his fingers. Tea, Kimber reasoned, was a feminine invention, ruled by females of a certain type: ruffled, beribboned, and iron-willed.”

“He’d never been shy, but he’d always been a little uncertain around girls. He just couldn’t believe they liked him.”

“Or he’d watch the news: more plagues, more famines, more floods, more insect or microbe or small-mammal outbreaks, more droughts, more chickenshit boy-soldier wars in distant countries. Why was everything so much like itself?”

“If you were to try and pick him out of a group of boys, you’d be wrong. He’d be the other one. Over at the side. The one your eye slipped over.”