A child blind from birth doesn't even know he's blind until someone tells him. Even then he has only the most academic idea of what blindness is; only the formerly sighted have a real grip on the thing. Ben Hanscom had no sense of being lonely because he had never been anything but. If the condition had been new, or more localized, he might have understood, but loneliness both encompassed his life and overreached it.

Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge, a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are, the more you're forced back on your own imagination.

His mother called such people ignorant and superstitious, but his father only shook his head slowly and puffed his pipe and said that sometimes old stories had a grain or two of truth in them and it was best not to take chances. It was why, he said, he crossed himself whenever a black cat crossed his path.

Bird and bear and hare and fish, give my love her fondest wish.

God turned out to be a bunch of bad little kids playing interstellar Xbox. Isn't that funny?

Talent is a dull knife that will cut nothing unless it is wielded with great force.

Lover," she whispers, and closes her eyes. It falls upon her. Love is like dying.