“Iggy’s spine tightened, his face like ice. When he’d been at the School, they’d tried to surgically enhance his night vision. Now he was blind forever. Oops.”

“He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.”

“He’d spent his entire exile schooling himself to face that he would never get what he wanted. People didn’t, sometimes. So you made a life as best you could.”

“He is gone now. His shop is gone. Weld Square is gone.
His life has been wiped clean off the board.
But I wake in the night and I see his face and I hear his voice.”

“He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.”

“He is asleep. Though his mettle was sorely tried,
He lived, and when he lost his angel, died.
It happened calmly, on its own.
The way night comes when day is done.”

“The leaf fall of his words, the stained glass hues of his moods, the rust in his voice, the smoke in his mouth, his breath on my vision like human breath blinding a mirror.”

“I am now mainly painting faces and landscapes; I am obsessed day and night by the vision of faces and colours. And the spiritual vision is my mystical world.”

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

“Great, they give blind kids guns," I said, trying to lessen his horror. "I don't even let Iggy have a gun. Usually.”