“Maybe if he did really well they'd give him some mouldy apples.”

“Percy tried to remember. He really did. For some reason, Annabeth and he had visited a spa and decided to destroy it. He couldn't imagine why. Maybe they hadn't like the deep-tissue massage? Maybe they'd gotten bad manicures?”

“He turned and looked at the boy. Maybe he understood for the first time that to the boy he was himself an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed. The tales of which were suspect. He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he'd lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he. He tried to remember the dream but he could not. All that was left was the feeling of it. He thought perhaps they'd come to warn him. Of what? That he could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own. Even now some part of him wished they'd never found this refuge. Some part of him always wished it to be over.”

“Maybe they'd use biological or chemical weapons instead. Maybe they'd crash the world economy. Maybe they'd turn every program on television into one of those reality shows.""That's mostly done already, Harry.""Oh. Well. I've got to believe that the world is worth saving anyway.”

“He thought he saw some horses, too, and a clown, but it was the faces of all those dead raptors that really bothered him. And maybe that clown a little bit.”

“Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?”