I didn't think she would willingly give me up to the hulk; but he would break her like a ceramic bank to get at the coins of knowledge that she held.

I was like a thought slipping through the fissures...

The value of any experience isn't in its positive or negative effect on his life but in the sheer luminous power of it, the vividness, the ferocity, the amount and degree of pure sensation that it provides. Intensity.

What was destiny? What was the power that shaped the patterns and attempted to enforce them? God? Should she be raging at God - or begging Him to let her son live and to spare her from the life of a cripple? Or was the power behind destiny merely a natural mechanism, a force no different in origin from gravity or magnetism?

But the more people we love and the more deeply we love them, the more vulnerable we are to loss and grief and loneliness.

Power is the central promise of evil, the dark light of that lamp, because nothing extinguishes the soul more quickly than pride in power.

You just don't get attacked by packs of rats in your own home.