“She too had lost her luck, and known death, and gone on.”

“His mother had been the world to him, and although she had done her best to prepare him, he had been too young to fully understand what death meant—until she was gone, and the great, raw, gaping hole in his heart could not be filled or patched or mended. He looked for her everywhere, even after he had been shown her body—looked and looked and she could not be found.”

“she tapped her finger and nothing happened and she thought she had lost her magic, but it had only changed and it took her awhile to figure it out.”

“Julia looked back at Hadassah on the bloodstained sand. A great emptiness opened within her as she looked at the still form. Gone, too, was the salt that had kept her from completely corruption.”

“The present alone was significant; was hers, to torture her as it was doing then with the biting conviction that she had lost that which she had held, that she had been denied that which her impassioned, newly awakened being demanded.”

“Kunti to Vidura when she found that her second Bhima had gone missing.”

“It was a long way down. Before she had gone very far the curious dizziness she had known before came over her again, a dizziness not entirely induced by the spirals she whirled around, but a deeper, atomic unsteadiness as if not only she but also the substances around her were shifting. There was something queer about the angles of those curves. She was no scholar in geometry or aught else, but she felt intuitively that the bend and slant of the way she went were somehow outside any other angles or bends she had ever known. They led into the unknown and the dark, but it seemed to her obscurely that they led into deeper darkness and mystery than the merely physical, as if, though she could not put it clearly even into thoughts, the peculiar and exact lines of the tunnel had been carefully angled to lead through poly-dimensional space as well as through the underground—perhaps through time, too.”

“Daisy had known the novel was silly even as she had read it, but that had not detracted one bit from her enjoyment.”

“All sense of reality had gone out of her life; she had abandoned herself to fate, and awaited the consequences with indifference.”

“They knew each other. He knew her and so himself, for in truth he had never known himself. And she knew him and so herself, for although she had always known herself she had never been able to recognize it until now.”