“their respect for the mystery--the half-grasped but never spoken idea that maybe, when you got right down to the place where the cheese binds, there is no such thing as marriage, no such thing as union, that each soul stood alone and ultimately defied rationality. That was the mystery.”

“Few if any seemed to have grasped the Principle of Reality; new knowledge leads always to yet more awesome mysteries. Greater physiological knowledge of the brain makes the existence of the soul less possible yet more probable by the nature of the search.”

“Everything that goes around comes around, they say, and although I've never been able to figure out who the mysteriously wise sages known as "they" might be, they're certainly right when it comes to time-travel.”

“It's the pool where we all go down to drink, to swim, to catch a little fish from the edge of the shore; it's also the pool where some hardy souls go out in their flimsy wooden boats after the big ones. It is the pool of life, the cup of imagination, and she has an idea that different people see different versions of it, but with two things ever in common: it's always about a mile deep in the Fairy Forest, and it's always sad. Because imagination isn't the only thing this place is about.”

“What comes in when daylight leaves is a kind of certainty: that beneath the skin there is a secret, some mystery both black and bright. You feel this mystery in every breath, you see it in every shadow, you expect to plunge into it at every turn of a step.”

“Oh, there were all sorts of things to wonder about, but the truth was simple: here stood this door alone on an endless stretch of beach, and it was for only one of two things: opening or leaving closed.”

“Feeling it, trying to understand the suns that shone on it, the rains that fell on it, and the snows that covered it. And to wonder where I was when each thing happened to it in its lonely place, where I was, what I was doing, who I was loving, how I was getting along, where I was. I’d hold it, read it, feel it... and look at my own face in whatever reflection might be left.”