They wanted eternal life; he gave them perpetual motion. It comes to the same thing, for such a race.

Stories were the way People lived. Like paths, they could be traveled in any direction, yet always ran from beginning to end.

She had understood all that he had said, with no way of knowing what he meant. It was as though he himself existed here in this town in this state in translation, ambiguous, slightly wrong, too highly colored or wrongly nuanced. Within him was the original, which no one could read.

If you know how to read, the World of Books is open to you, after all; and if you like to read, you’ll read. If you don’t, you’ll forget whatever anybody makes you read, anyway.

There is more than one history of the world.

The Chinese, you know, believe that deep within each of us, no larger than the ball of your thumb, is the garden of the immortals, the great valley where we are all king forever.

She knew – she knew by now – that there really can be a person, one at least, that you can embrace as easily and wholly as though the two of you were one thing, a thing that once upon a time was broken into pieces and is now put back together. And how could she know this unless he knew it too? It was part of the wholeness, that he must; and that too she knew. With her he was for a moment whole, they were whole: as whole as an egg, and as fragile.

Aristotle says clearly, and St. Thomas follows him, that corporeal similitudes excite the memory more easily than the naked notions themselves.

His heart pounding with fear and elation, and his head humming with the fierce certainty of a sure thing, he kissed her. She responded as though for her too a certainty had proved out, and in the midst of her hair and lips and long arms encircling him, Smoky added a treasure of great price to the small store of his wisdom.

Everybody grows up by leaps, and not by a steady climb like a mountaineer.