“We were failures, all of us. We told him we had our reasons for the way things had turned out, but he didn't want to hear it. Told us that nothing consumed a man's soul more than the easy excuse.”

“We mark with light in the memory the few interviews we have had with souls that made our souls wiser, that spoke what we thought, that told us what we knew, that gave us leave to be what we inly are.”

“Maybe we tried so hard to be like the Sisterhood because it was easy for them and we wanted it to be easy for us. Because they were lucky and we wanted to be lucky too. They had wonder, and we didn't have any. We looked for the magic, but we didn't fine it. We waited for the magic, but it didn't find us.”

“But surely he had told that story before. All of us, we tell our stories over and over again. Not in the same way and we don't always recognize them for what they are, the same way we don't always recognize that all creation myths boil down to God and man and a thunderstorm.”

“We underestimated human potential, both the strength of man's intellect and the weakness of his flesh, and therefore his receptivity to satanic inspiration -- but ultimately he is our creature, and so what we've really underestimated is our own creativity. What we made has turned out to be more than what we thought we had made. So ultimately in our failure there is a compliment to us: our creativity is greater than ourselves!”

“All we could get out of them was that they were taking us to 'Kurokuma'. We didn't know if that was a place or a person. What does it mean, by the way?''I'm told it's a term of great respect,' Horace said, unwilling to admit that he didn't know.”