“People came to the desert because the stars were in the desert, and the stars had yet to be corrupted by man... The stars, it seemed, would crush man in a scenic, gravitational panorama before man would ever corrupt the stars.”

“Looking up in the sky, I saw the stars were brighter now. They made a pattern I had never noticed before- a gleaming constellation that looked a lot like a girls figure- a girl with a bow, running across the sky. "Let the world honor you, my Huntress. Live forever in the stars.”

“Have I mentioned that I expect death around every turn, that every blue sky has a safe sailing out of it, that every bus runs me over, that every low, mean syllable uttered in my direction seems to intimate the violence of murder, that every family seems like an opportunity for ruin and every marriage a ceremony into which calamity will fall and hearts will be broken and lives destroyed and people branded by the mortifications of love? ”

“The cold stars spun to the ancient rhythm, the august march of an everlasting symphony. They are old, the stars, and their memory is long.”

“it was as if the entire day, the entire vacation even, were leading up to a single moment. he felt certain then that stan lee was in some direct communication with the universe - in a way, say, that the watcher, the most mysterious marvel character, was content like some gnostic entity merely to know of machinations of creation - and that through lee's spiritually advanced vision, paul's own destiny was entrapped in the monthly serializations of these kitschy superheroes. he seemed both influenced and influencer in the world of marvel.”

“Death was terribly durable. It was the sturdiest idea around. A body was dead, and before long it wasn't even a body anymore, it was just elements. But it was still dead.”

“The Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, said: "My Companions are as stars. Whomsoever of them you follow, you will be rightly guided." When a man looks at a star, and finds his way by it, the star does not speak any word to that man. Yet, by merely looking at the star, the man knows the road from roadlessness and reaches his goal.”