“...The silence of a place where there were once horsesis a mountainand I have seen by lightning that ever mountainonce fell from the airringinglike the chime of an iron shoe...”

“He told stories to help Two Mothers overcome childish fear. "Now,my son, why do you fear the storm? It is only the warriors of thunder and lightning. When you are tempted to be afraid, remember that God tells the lightning where it may go.Pretend that the noise and the light are from two warriors called Thunder and Lightning. They ride beautiful, swift ponies and carry lightning in their hands.As they race the wind,their ponies' hooves strike the clouds.That is the thunder.When they throw their lightning sticks, it flashes brightly in the sky.When God says 'Enough!' the warriors ride down to the earth, bringing the rain to water their ponies.""Have you ever seen the ponies, Father?""Once, when I was hunting in the Black Hills, I thought I caught a glimpse of them. But before Wind and I could catch them, they rose again into the sky, taking the thunder and lightning with them to another place.”

“Because the human history is the history of shoes. The history of places where we ever tread and stand.”

“Then a complete silence fell over everybody; where once Dean would have talked his way out, he now fell silent himself, but standing in front of everybody, ragged and broken and idiotic, right under the lightbulbs, his bony mad face covered with sweat and throbbing veins, saying, "Yes, yes, yes," as though tremendous revelations were pouring into him all the time now, and I am convinced they were, and the others suspected as much and were frightened. He was BEAT-the root, the soul of Beatific.”

“San Francisco is the place where most people were last seen”

“Like a lightning bug... Like a lightning bug?... Yes, just like a night lightning bug; because there are day lightning bugs too - even if nobody has ever seen one, I know there are some, and I know the day lightning bugs are the cockroaches that since they can't light up, people kill them.”