“I know vaudeville isn't supposed to be art. It's supposed to be entertainment, which is different. But I think art...I think it's making something from nothing, basically. It's taking something as simple as movement, or a few notes, or steps, or words, and putting them all together so that they're bigger than what they ever could have been separate. They're transformed. And just witnessing that transformation changes you. It reaches into your insides and moves things around. It's magic, of a sort. I never really knew that until I saw your act. But when you walked out on that stage, I knew I was seeing something...different. Something maybe more amazing than what the professor and Silenus had done. You were making something up there, out of just the simplest elements possible, and seeing it changed something in me. I'd never encountered anything like that.”

“What I'm going to do up here, kid, is tell you a story. Like all stories, it's an attempt to make sense of something larger than itself. And, like most stories, it fails, to a certain degree. It's a gloss, a rendition, so it's not exact. But it'll do. -Silenus”

“My first question is- do you have a name?"A name? Yes.""Ah!" said the wolf. It wrote several extensive notes. "And what is that name?" "George.""I see," said the wolf. "And how long have you been George?""How long? As in, how long have I been alive?" "oh, were you here in some way before you were alive?" asked the wolf, interested."I...don't really know," said George. " I don't think so." "So you don't know if you were here? Or if you were here before your George-time? Is it possible for you to be here, bu not know it?""My what time? no, I mean, I was born, and then they just named me George." "So you are not George," said the wolf. George is just a name. A word. A propulsion of air modified by the flexing of throat parts." "Well, I am George, but...yes. Yes, and...no." "Is it possible that you became George at a later time, having been originally named that thing?" asked the wolf. " What if the naming had been different, would you still be George?" "I...yes?" "Really?" breathed the wolf in awe. "This is all so confusing." Yet he seemed very pleased with George's answers. " I don't know how you all do it. It seems so marvelously complex to simply...be.”

“Die. Do you think I will? I suppose I must...I exist now, and everything that exists must end, one day. I wonder how I will die, and what it will be like. It will be most interesting, don't you think? [...] Yes. Yes, I think it will," said the wolf. "I look forward to it. On the whole, I think it is a very strange and terrifying thing, to exist. I really don't understand how you do it. Tell me - how do you deal with the fear? "The fear?" asked George. "Yes. That fear that comes from the feeling that there is you, and then there is...everything else. That you are trapped inside of yourself, a tiny dot insignificant in the face of every everything that could ever be. How do you manage that?" George considered how to answer. "I...guess we just never think about it.""Never think about it!" cried the wolf. "How can you not think about it when it confronts you at every moment? You are lost amid a wide, dark sea, with no shores in sight, and you all so rarely panic! Some days I can barely function, so how on earth can you never think about it?""Well, I...suppose we distract ourselves," said George. "But with what?". "I don't know. With all kinds of things.”

“I put my office right in the middle of the death they threaten us with. [...] here I sit, every day, hanging over all this wasted nothing. I will never forget what the world could be, should my vigilance never fail. And more than that, I will never forget that in a way we are all hanged men and hanged women, awaiting those deaths which cannot be avoided. Yet I will make sure that we live and die the way we choose for as long as we possibly can.”

“I never knew a building could hold so much inside.. . . I saw my town as if I had just arrived. It was as if I was waking up. You see houses and buildings every day, and you walk by them on your way to something else, and you hardly see. You hardly notice they're even there, mostly because there's something else going on right in front of your face. But when the town itself becomes the thing that is going on right in front of your face, it all changes, and you're not just looking at a house but at what's happened in that house before you were born.”

“When I looked, I knew I might never again see so much of the earth so beautiful, the beautiful being something you know added to something you see, in a whole that is different from the sum of its parts. What I saw might have been just another winter scene, although an impressive one. But what I knew was that the earth underneath was alive and that by tomorrow, certainly by the day after, it would be all green again. So what I saw because of what I knew was a kind of death with the marvellous promise of less than a three-day resurrection.”