“Even while writing his book, he had become painfully aware how little he knew his own planet while attempting to piece together another one from jagged bits filched from deranged brains.”

“She'd seen the kindness in him that he hid from the world, and she'd glimpsed some of the pain that he kept to himself. While she knew she should hate him, every day they were together, she discovered another part of his soul, and it wasn't frightening.It was strangely beautiful.”

“His books are exciting and powerful and — if I may filch the word from the booksy ones — pulsing.”

“He was uninterested in art, politics, culture, people. While his brain burrowed through rock toward a very specific knowledge goal, mine preferred to warren the air; his brain operated a drill bit while mine launched a thousand aimless kites that tangled strings or bounced along the invisible currents, disconnected and alone. Cognitively, we were the gravitational negatives of each other. Sometimes I wished I had his brain. But only sometimes. He suffered due to his specialized excesses; he just suffered differently from me.”

“Gibbons wondered vaguely if he was becoming a morphine addict. He had certainly dosed himself into a stupid on account of the hideous pain resulting from the nurse's insistence that he get up and sit in a chair. He rather thought that being a drug addict would interfere with his career as a police detective, but that didn't seem to matter as much as it had a little while ago.”

“After a long while he sat upright with great effort, exhaled a sigh and reached for a clean sheet of lined paper, smoothing it out on the desk. He unscrewed the lid of his fountain pen, laid it perpendicular to his paper, and began to write. Often he compared his writing to white water. He had only to leap in to be dragged away on its rapids, thrown this way and that with his own will rendered impotent. While writing he found the words came from the muscles in his hands, the feel of the shaft of his pen, the locked joint of his elbow. the scratching noise of the nib marking paper and, underneath all that, some coordinating impulse in his guts. Certainly not from his mind.”