It's like you said the other day," said Adam. "You grow up readin' about pirates and cowboys and spacemen and stuff, and jus' when you think the world's full of amazin' things, they tell you it's really all dead whales and chopped-down forests and nucular waste hangin' about for millions of years. 'Snot worth growin' up for, if you ask my opinion.

There are stories you build and there are stories you construct; then there are the stories that you hack out of rock removing all the things that are not the story.

I want to go home. Then he mentally underlined the last sentence three times, rewrote it in huge letters in red ink, and circled it before putting a number of exclamation marks next to it in his mental margin.

When you die, they can make you into diamonds now. It’s scientific. That’s how I want to be remembered. I want to shine.

It is good for children to find themselves facing the elements of a fairy tale - they are well-equipped to deal with these

The only thing that kept me going was stories. Stories are hope. They take you out of yourself for a bit, and when you get dropped back in, you're different- you're stronger, you've seen more, you've felt more. Stories are like spiritual currency.

Nobody's seen Jesus in years.