“It's fine. I hardly think about it now. It's long gone. Yet there is sometimes the shadow of a shadow, and when that happens I wonder if it could come back. And I don't know, because I don't know what caused it in the first place. My ohysche was turned inside out and shaken, but they never got to the bottom of why.”

“...when I came back, I found Mom sobbing at the kitchen table...Then I asked her what had happened.'Nothing,'she said. 'I was thinking about that man...I started thinking about...if he and his wife and their other child are okay, and I don't know. It just got to me.''I know,' I said, because I did know. Sometimes it's safer to cry about people you don't know than to think about people you really love.”

“For a long time, I did not move from the dark, wood-panelled hall. I wanted company, and I had none, lights and warmth and a strong drink inside me, I needed reassurance. But, more than anything else, I needed an explanation. It is remarkable how powerful a force simple curiosity can be. I had never realized that before now. In spite of my intense fear and sense of shock, I was consumed with the desire to find out exactly who it was that I had seen, and how, I could not rest until I had settled the business, for all that, while out there, I had not dared to stay and make any investigations.”

“I love the book. I love the feel of a book in my hands, the compactness of it, the shape, the size. I love the feel of paper. The sound it makes when I turn a page. I love the beauty of print on paper, the patterns, the shapes, the fonts. I am astonished by the versatility and practicality of The Book. It is so simple. It is so fit for its purpose. It may give me mere content, but no e-reader will ever give me that sort of added pleasure.”

“Whatever was about, whoever I had seen, and heard rocking, and who had passed me by just now, whoever had opened the locked door was not 'real'. No. But what was 'real'? At that moment I began to doubt my own reality.”

“My head reeled at the sheer and startling beauty, the wide, bare openness of it. The sense of space, the vastness of the sky above and on either side made my heart race, I would have travelled a thousand miles to see this. I had never imagined such a place.”

“I don't do this," he continued. "I don't get involved. But I've never wanted anyone as much as I want you. It started out as chemistry, pure sexual attraction. I don't even know what to call it. But it's different now. It's bigger and I can't control it and I can't not be with you.”