Perhaps he was a fool, but he thought that if a work were truly great you would only have to read it once and you would be stolen from yourself, desperately moved, changed forever.

They were dancing around the fountain, arm in arm, in an old Dutch dance, their cheeks touching, their hands entwined. They had no music; they hummed. And there was no reason for them to be dancing that Peter Lake could see, except that it was an exceptionally beautiful night.

Because there were all kinds of hell - some were black and dirty, and some were silvery and high.

I'm not afraid," Rafi said. "Why not?" "If I die tomorrow it will have been useless to have been afraid today.

I've imagined great victories, and I've imagined great races. The races are better.

Really the best way to learn about something is simply to read it and not make a scientific theory of interpretation.

She died on a windy gray day in March when the sky was full of darting crows and the world lay prostrate and defeated after winter. Peter Lake was at her side and it ruined him forever. It broke him as he had not ever imagined he could have been broken. He would never again be young, or able to remember what it was like to be young. What he had once taken to be pleasures would appear to him in his defeat as hideous and deserved punishments for reckless vanity.