“Like the thick quilt I'd played under as a child, the dark felt familiar and protecting.”

“After a heavy snowfall one night in early December the snow formed a thick quilt from which the old man's face emerged like a sleeping child's above an eiderdown. Jim told himself that he never moved because he was warm under the snow.”

“Her lungs felt thick and slow, her mind dissolved, she felt she could cling like a bat in the long swoon of the crannied, underword darkness. Cling like a bat and sway for ever swooning in the draughts of the darkness ---”

“He remembered waking up once, listening to the wind, thinking of all the dark and rushing cold outside and all the warmth of this bed, filled with their peaceful heat under two quilts, and wishing it could be like this forever.”

“A basic moral imperative is in play here. If you can protect a child, you must.”

“I don’t want the finer things in life, like preserves of jam and thick soft quilts, until I get what I need: the machinery to make that stuff for me.”