"One thing I've always wondered—why did you enter that bikini contest when you were a teenager?” Her face flushed with a mixture of anger and embarrassment. “How far back did you trace me?” “Far enough.” A pause. “You didn't answer my question.” “And you didn't turn into a puff of smoke and disappear. The world is full of disappointments."

"Though his health and family had been broken in the process, he'd found his purpose in life — to share the ancient key discovered anew in the garden: if we feed the earth, it will feed us.I see that is the secret, too, to living. Though the earth demands its sacrifices, spring will always return."

"Will stared down at his hands. 'My whole life wrecked, destroyed...' 'You're seventeen,' Magnus said. 'You can't have wrecked a life you've barely lived."

"What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person."

"We'll never find that one, and I'll be blamed,' announced Edd Tollett, the dour grey-haired squire everyone called Dolorous Edd. 'Nothing ever goes missing that they don't look at me, ever since that time I lost my horse. As if that could be helped. He was white and it was snowing, what did they expected."

"My thoughts and imaginations are little seeds. I want them to grow tall and strong like a tree. I plant them in the soil of paper and let them grow to shade and support the world with beauty, love, joy."

"I want to yell so loud that Baby Girl can hear me that dirty ain't a color, disease ain't the Negro side a town. I want to stop that moment from coming - and it come in ever white child's life - when they start to think that colored folks ain't as good as whites. ... I pray that wasn't her moment, Pray I still got time."

"Christ,' he said to the tiny reflection of himself that floated along the surface of his coffee,'You have become quite the maudlin sop, haven't you? Laughing softly, he rubbed a hand over his face. Step one on the road back to sanity, stop talking to yourself."