Explore Book Quotes

“We make Hell real; we stoke its fires. And in its flames our hope expires. Heaven, too, is merely our creation. We can grant ourselves our own salvation. All that’s required is imagination.”

“Think of your life as an hourglass. You know there are thousands of grains of sand in the top of the hourglass; and they all pass slowly and evenly through the narrow neck in the middle. Nothing you or I could do would make more than one grain of sand pass through this narrow neck without impairing the hourglass. You and I and everyone else are like this hourglass…if we do not take [tasks] one at a time and let them pass…slowly and evenly, then we are bound to break our own…structure.”

“Though chains be of gold, they are chains all the same.”

“In anatomy lab, we objectified the dead, literally reducing them to organs, tissues, nerves, muscles. On that first day, you simply could not deny the humanity of the corpse . . . Anatomy lab, in the end, becomes less a violation of the sacred and more something that interferes with happy hour, and that realization discomfits. In our rare reflective moments, we were all silently apologizing to our cadavers, not because we sensed the transgression but because we did not.”

“It’s an Expedition. That’s what an Expedition means. A long line of everybody. You’d better tell the others to get ready, while I see if my gun’s all right. And we must all bring Provisions.”

“She saw that you are somebody. She recognized you . . . as the shape of God’s heart. Sometimes people cry when they see that.”

“I felt hopeless and sad as though everyone in the world had died save the three of us and the unknown lamplighter on the shore.”

“Moana, the sea God, thunders on the reef. He is angry with us all because Mafatu is afraid!”

“Until we as a race can learn to rise together, we’ll never get anywhere. That’s our trouble. We work against one another instead of together.”

“Little bears have short memories and in a few days Bruce forgot all about ever being a giant of a bear. For all he knew Roxy’s flower garden was a beautiful leafy green forest with plenty of room to roam.”