“The man he was now, the personality his friends knew, had begun to grow strong during adolescence, during the years when he was always consciously or unconsciously conjugating the verb "to love"-- in society and solitude, with people, with books, with the sky and open country, in the lonesomeness of crowded city streets.”

“Man is the candle light and a woman is the moonlight. They live far away but can grow together during lonesome nights. ”

“Now he knew that any memories he might cherish during the last years of his life would be only fictions from a biography he'd never lived.”

“…Even the idea of a city never entered his mind. It was as if he had walked under the millimeter of haze just above the inked fibers of a map, that pure zone between land and chart, between distances and legends, between nature and storyteller. The place they had chosen to come to, to be their best selves, to be unconscious of ancestry. Here, apart from the sun compass and the odometer mileage, and the book, he was alone, his own invention. He knew during these times how the mirage worked, the fata morgana, for he was within it.”

“Kent had begun sleeping with his good eye open, for he knew the mark of sedition when he saw it. Even partway blinded, who could see it better?”

“And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.”