“He had never heard of the lame, the halt, and the blind that had been cured; or if he had, he did not think these incidents of enough importance to be embalmed in an epistle.”

“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.”

“He had to keep thinking of them because if he forgot them and did not think of them they might forget about him. And he had to keep hoping.”

“Later he had seen the things that he could never think of and later still he had seen much worse.”

“I had been lying to myself, thinking I was free, thinking I had let him go. It didn't matter what he said or did, I'd never let him go." - Belly Conklin”

“Her eyes always had a frantic, lost look. He could never cure her eyes of that.”

“He had been mistaken several times for Robert Redford, but on each occasion it was by a blind person.”

“It was in these wounded days the beginning of the man he would grow to be. He bore his pain and endured his wound as if a sign he too had been blooded by the madness that’d taken ahold of the land. He no longer shied from people, from the lone riders, from the reenslaved herded South. He no longer feared their presence on the roads and his conversion was believable to him. He had lived and did not die. He was breathing. Still, it was only the beginning and he was not old enough to know these changes, did not even know enough to think this way yet.”

“But that was only the beginning of her mortification. Harold had proved her wrong. He had seen that she was a shifty, shallow hypocrite. She had not dared to be alone with him since her exposure. She had never looked at him and had hardly spoken. He seemed cheerful, but what was he thinking? He would never forgive her.”

“Derek picked the spot? Had he been hoping I'd be blinded by the morning sun and stumble off the edge?”