“[As a very young man, I thought] of Europe as a place that could not exist except in the imagination, in glorious dreams, and through the careful lies of the silver screen.”

“Sometimes I wish I was in the movies...Not to be famous or nothing. I just wish I was made of light. Then nobody’d know me except for what they saw up on that screen. I’d just be light up on the silver screen, and not at all a man.”

“What good I thought I could do, all alone, against thousands of years of mistrust and the power of a Demonlord, I cannot now imagine: but such are the dreams of youth, too gloriously stupid to realise what cannot be done. And without those dreams, how should we ever accomplish the impossible?”

“If there is one place on the face of earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India!”

“Now, five years is nothing in a man's life except when he is very young and very old...- Wang Lung”

“One of these people was a girl who exemplified everything I could ever come up with to want. We grew very close very quickly and revealed dreams and compared fears and mocked gently and occasionally told lies, but nothing bad. The sex, I’m sorry, Dad, but the sex was unlike anything I believed might someplace exist. I remember lying with her in bed and touching her thigh and thinking, My God. This is the reason I grew hands in the first place.”