“I am learning, as I make my way through my first continent, that it is remarkably easy to do things, and much more frightening to contemplate them.”

“To be worth making at all, a journey has to be made in the mind as much as in the world of objects and dimensions.”

“I'm pretty sure my parents arepretending they are sick.I know because I taught them bothto do that little trick. You blow your nose and hold your headand claim your brain is breaking.And so, a pro like me would knowmy folks are clearly faking.A little thing I learned in schoolconvinced me I am right.My parents are supposed to meetmy principal tonight.”

“...I once thought I defeated the evil in my heart. I learned something: We can face our demons, burn them up, stomp them into the ground. I turned mine to ashes. But even if you destroy the evidence of evil, you can't heal your heart. Not by yourself.”

“My name is Gerhard Braun, and I am God.”

“For a moment, my eyes shift focus to the glass wall beside her and I see my reflection. There stands Dominic Smith, whose tinted specs make him look dead cool, thank you very much, although the scraggy black hair manages to spoil the effect. My hair stages more uprisings than a nineteenth-century revolutionary. I inherited it from my dad. Thanks, Dad.”

“Past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully. My journey to the past had changed nothing, but what I had learned had changed everything, and I understood that it could not have been otherwise. If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then we are the audience as well as the players, and it is by living these tales that we receive their lessons.”