“I liked to feel I had to do things perfectly; I felt I was earning my freedom. Though I was in hiding, and though I worked every day until midnight, I felt I was much more in charge of myself than ...”

“And that luck was only fate's cheating, giving an illusion of power. But that illusion lingered, and I became restless. I decided to act, to challenge fate. (...) I gained courage; every afternoon ...”

“Small things start us in new ways of thinking”

“What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And -- though played out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and Fal...”

“It was a light which gave solidity to everything and drew colour out from the heart of objects.”

“A complying memory has obliterated many of them and edited my childhood down to a brief cinematic blur.”

“The tragedy of power like mine is that there is no way down. There can only be extinction. Dust to dust rags to rags fear to fear. ”

“Poison!" Grover yelped. "Don't let those things touch you or...""Or we'll die?" I guessed."Well...after you shrivel slowly to dust, yes.""Let's avoid the swords," I decided.”

“The seeker after truth should be humbler than the dust. The world crushes the dust under its feet, but the seeker after truth should so humble himself that even the dust could crush him. Only then,...”

“Three hundred types of mussel, a third of the worlds total, live in the Smokies. Smokies mussels have terrific names, like purple wartyback, shiny pigtoe, and monkeyface pearlymussel. Unfortunately...”

“I think now that maybe true sweetness can only happen in limbo.”

“We're so self-important. So arrogant. Everybody's going to save something now. Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save the snails. And the supreme arrogance? Save the planet! Are these...”

“The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't li...”

“I wonder if fears ever really go away, or if they just lose their power over us.”

“Fear is all in the mind”