“Our father knew more than any living person about the secret of time, except how to live in it. His time did not travel; it was a block of persisting nows.”

“Feeling for the first time what it meant to kick open doors that kept closing, no matter how many legends had already passed through.”

“Silence: the motor drive of nothingness underneath all rhythm - threatened to last forever, a spell of sleep cast over the entire kingdom of listeners.”

“He stayed inside his perfect silence, hung on the stopped, forward edge of nowhere”

“We'd drifted too far to rely on the old boyhood telepathy anymore.”

“The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.”

“Soldiers manage by dividing themselves. They're one man in the killing, another at home, and the man that dandles his bairn on his knee has nothing to do wi' the man who crushed his enemy's throat ...”

“If we truly trust no one, we cannot survive.”

“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked high...”

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”

“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and...”