“He found, using fifty stones to keep track, that he could easily remember the names of all fifty states, and he knew the capitols of a lot of them. He knew his times tables all the way up to twelve...”

“Keep in mind that in the whole long tradition of storytelling, from Greek myths through Shakespeare through King Arthur and Robin Hood, this whole notion that you can't tell stories about certain c...”

“I try asking him some more questions, but it's like talking to voice mail.”

“He took me down and out into the afterlife of the brightly lit streets, a haze of rain around each streetlight like a galaxy, the whole street a universe spread out like a banquet.”

“The skyscrapers of the city had finished scraping all the sky away, and the clouds overhead were exactly the color of concrete and I was safe and cold in a canyon of glass and steel.”

“He'd grown unused to woods like this. He'd become accustomed to the Northwest, evergreen and shaded dark. Here he was surrounded by soft leaves, not needles; leaves that carried their deaths secret...”

“They call this war a cloud over the land. But they made the weather and then they stand in the rain and say 'Shit, it's raining!”

“Halfway home, the sky goes from dark gray to almost black and a loud thunder snap accompanies the first few raindrops that fall. Heavy, warm, big drops, they drench me in seconds, like an overturne...”

“For the rest of my life, Zanzibar will be the Swahili word for rain. The rain would drizzle, spit, mist, downpour, shower, torrent, gust, deluge and blast. At one point it hit the ground so hard it...”