"No universal selfishness can bring social good to all. Communism - the effort to give all men what they need and to ask of each the best they can contribute - this is the only way of human life."

"Before the next minute had passed, they had all fallen to the ground. Just like that. As though someone had reached inside and turned off a switch.'What happened?' Matt asked, gasping.I went from one person to the next, trying to wake them up, but they were all dead, wrote Daft Donald."

"Kenji has a hand pressed to his mouth, desperately trying to suppress a smile. He’s shaking his head, holding up a hand in apology. And then he breaks, laughing out loud, snorting as he tries to muffle the sound. “I’m sorry,” he says, pressing his lips together, shaking his head again. “This is not a funny moment. It’s not. I’m not laughing."

"For a moment she lay still in the big bed, blinking sleepily, loath to move.And then she realized that the angel’s song hadn’t stopped on her waking.Silence sat up. The tantalizingly beautiful voice was coming from the half-open door to Mickey O’Connor’s room."

"I could be listening to Painted Red weave the stories of the saints in her rich roomy voice, and beginning to see how all those stories were in some way one story: a simple story about being alive, and being a man; a story that, simple as it was, couldn't itself be told."

"Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old."