“Spring. Blooms break forth from the startled earth. The sky laughs. The trees, abashed, dress themselves in verdant green. And the heavens are lush with starts. Redeem the time, the stars sing down. Redeem the dream.And the boy waking in the land of broken rocks, the dry land wet with spring rain, waking in the place where two dreams cross--the dream where seeds grow into trees of gold and the dream of the box that he cannot open.”

“Between the sleeping and the waking, it is there. Between the rising and the resting, it is there.It is always there. It gnaws on my heart. It chews on my soul.I turn aside and see it. I stop my ears and hear it. I cover myself and feel it.There are no human words for what I mean.It is the language of the bare bough and the cold stone, pronounced in the fell wind's sullen whisper and the metronomic drip-drip of the rain. It is the song the falling snow sings and the discordant clamour of sunlight ripped apart by the canopy and miserly filtered down.It is what the unseeing eye sees. It is what the deaf ear heres.It is the romantic ballad of death's embrace; the solemn hymn of offal dripping from bloody teeth; the lamentation of the bloated corpse rotting in the sun; the graceful ballet of maggots twisting in the ruins of God's temple.Here in this gray land, we have no name. We are the carcasses reflected in the yellow eye.Our bones are bleached within our skin; our empty sockets regard the crow.Here in this shadow country, our tiny voices scratch like a fly's wing against unmoving air.Ours is the language of imbeciles, the gibberish of idiots. The root and the vine have more to say than us.”

“The intervening years are sucked down these acheronian halls like light into a black hole while you helplessly teeter upon the event horizon, where time is measured by the beating of a fly's wing in the stagnant air.”

“Is it any wonder the power this man held over me - this man who did not run from his demons like most of us do, but embraced them as his own, clutching them to his heart in a choke-hold grip. He did not try to escape them by denying them or drugging them or bargaining with them. He met them where they lived, in the secret place most of us keep hidden. Warthrop was Warthrop down to the marrow of his bones, for his demons defined him; they breathed the breath of life into him; and without them, he would go down, as most of us do, into the purgatorial fog of a life unrealized.”

“I left them there for the flies and the birds and the sun and the wind. In the silence outside the Tour du Silence, I left them. Where the faceless dead faced the sky, I left them there at the center of the world.”

“It isn't up to me to break his heart; that's time's job.”

“...Grimacing, I plunged a hand into the fouled water to clear the clog, morbid curiosity drawing my youthful eyes to the gray globs of gore floating upon the surface. It was not horror that seized my imagination so much as wonder: sixty years of dreams and desires, hunger and hope, love and longing, blasted away in a single explosive instant, mind and brain. The mind of Erasmus Gray was gone; the remnants of its vessel floated, as light and insubstantial as popcorn, in the water. Which fluffy bit held your ambition, Erasmus Gray? Which speck your pride? Ah, how absurd the primping and preening of our race! Is it not the ultimate arrogance to believe we are more than is contained in our biology? What counterarguments may be put forth, what valid objections raised, to the claim of Ecclesiastes, "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity"?”