“Voyaging great distances – through forests, from island to island, across plains and into the mountains – is all about finding ourselves.”

“All her life she had known that books were living things, not just a convergence of concept and ink, intellect and paper. They did not breathe or think, but they grew and gave a sense of potential so much larger than whatever was written on their pages.”

“To the discovered, the discoverer can be a god.”

“Humans crave knowledge, and when that craving ends, we are no longer human.”

“The Soul Toupee is that thing about ourselves we are most deeply embarrassed by and like to think we have cunningly concealed from the world, but which is, in fact, pitifully obvious to everybody who knows us.”

“This is for everyone who has ever looked at the stars, or gazed from atop a hill, or across the sea and wondered...”

“We are born to love as we are born to die, and between the heartbeats of those two great mysteries lies all the tangled undergrowth of our tiny lives. There is nowhere to go but through. And so we walk on, lost, and lost again, in the mapless wilderness of love.”