“From up above, in a plane passing over, you’d just see one little light in all this dark, with no idea of the lives that were being lived within it, and in the house beside, and beside that one. So much happening in the world, night and day, hour by hour. It was no wonder we were meant to sleep, if only to check out of it for a little while.”

“That was one of the things about the night. Stuff that would be weird in the bright light of day just wasn’t so much once you passed a certain hour. It was like the dark just evened it all out somehow.”

“... and then (Daddy) reached up and caught a firefly as it glowed beside him. 'See this light?' he asked me when the firefly lit up his hand ... That light is bright enough to light up a little speck of the night sky so a man can see it a ways away ... We're to be lights in the dark, cold days that are this world. Like fireflies in December.”

“...It's just one hour. Just one little hour. What could happen in one hour?”

“Watching him, I thought, not for the first time that night, that maybe it should have felt strange to be with him, here, now. And yet it didn’t, at all. That was one of the things about the night. Stuff that would be weird in the bright light of day just wasn’t so much once you passed a certain hour. It was like the dark just evened it all out somehow.”

“It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.”