“Sometimes [...] real love is silent as well as blind.”

“Sometimes, he thought, real love is silent as well as blind.”

“Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”

“Love is old slaughterer. Love is not blind. Love is a canibal with extremely acute vision. Love is insectile, it is always hungry”

“A child blind from birth doesn't even know he's blind until someone tells him. Even then he has only the most academic idea of what blindness is; only the formerly sighted have a real grip on the thing. Ben Hanscom had no sense of being lonely because he had never been anything but. If the condition had been new, or more localized, he might have understood, but loneliness both encompassed his life and overreached it.”

“These things were...well...they were dreams-made-real. And once dreams became real, they escaped the power of the dreamer and became their own deadly things, capable of independent action.”

“He was one of those quite rare adults who communicate with small children fairly well and who love them all impartially--not in a sugary way but in a businesslike fashion that may sometimes entail a hug, in the same way that closing a big business deal may call for a handshake.”