The novel is a game or joke shared between author and reader.

What is important is the moment of opening a life and feeling it touch--with an electric hiss and cry--this speckled mineral sphere, our present world.

Admire the world for never ending on you -- as you would an opponent, without taking your eyes away from him, or walking away.

These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present.

We live in all we seek.

Your feelings are none of your business.

After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.