“During the first two days of travel north of Miles City, in a country tht was custom-made for pronghorn antelope, they did not see a single one; the only living creatures they saw were prairie dogs, rabbits, and turkey vultures, wheeling high overhead as if scouting for the last meal in Montana. It was forlorn, abandoned country, a country of great absences, which had once been filled by the dust and noise and dung of one of the planet's greatest zoological spectacles but ws now almost completely silent.”

“A man could shoot thirty ducks if it pleased him, and then shoot thirty more the next day, and it was perfectly legal. His hunting partner was likely to be the county sheriff.”

“There was no girls' cross-country team at our high school, since cross-country courses were two or three miles long, and, at that distance, a girl's uterus could fall out.”

“There are books, that one has for twenty years without reading them, that one always keeps at hand, that one takes along from city to city, from country to country, carefully packed, even when there is very little room, and perhaps one leafs through them while removing them from a trunk; yet one carefully refrains from reading even a complete sentence. Then after twenty years, there comes a moment when suddenly, as though under a high compulsion, one cannot help taking in such a book from beginning to end, at one sitting: it is like a revelation. Now one knows why one made such a fuss about it. It had to be with one for a long time; it had to travel; it had to occupy space; it had to be a burden; and now it has reached the goal of its voyage, now it reveals itself, now it illuminates the twenty bygone years it mutely lived with one. It could not say so much if it had not been there mutely the whole time, and what idiot would dare to assert that the same things had always been in it.”

“for he had acquired, as time went on, the firm conviction that any thought, even the most audacious, that any fiction, even the most insane, can one day materialize and see its fulfillment in space and time.”

“At the time no one really knew for sure that John Cropsey was more than the stuff of campfire stories. Not the townspeople, who saw their businesses wither and die with the bad publicity he brought. Not even the survivors of of his onslaught against Camp Beechwood. The only people who were certain that Cropsey was more than just the figment of a vivid imagination were the ones who would never share their secret knowledge: his victems.”

“One only makes books in order to keep in touch with one's fellows after one has ceased to breath, and thus to defend oneself against the inexorable fate of all that lives - transitoriness and oblivion.”